Eighty women live and work at the Monastero Suore Cistercensi in Vitorchiano, a hilltop village 30 miles north of Rome in the volcanic landscape of northern Lazio. They make cheese, beer, spirits, sweets, and wine, all within the walls of their self-sustaining community. The wines have, against the logic of the conventional wine world, become genuinely celebrated: not as a novelty, but as an expression of what happens when farming is honest and winemaking gets out of the way.
Backstory
The Sisters have been farming their vineyards organically since the early 1990s, but it was in the early 2000s that their wines found a wider audience, when Giampiero Bea, son of renowned Umbrian natural winemaker Paolo Bea, began advising them on cellar practices. The partnership with Rosenthal Wine Merchant, which has distributed the wines in the United States and Japan for over two decades, brought the monastery's bottles to natural wine lovers internationally. Today the wines are poured in the world's finest natural wine lists.
The Region
Vitorchiano sits in the Tuscia subzone of northern Lazio, in a landscape shaped by ancient volcanic activity. The soils are rich in volcanic minerals, with the tufaceous and basaltic character common to this part of Lazio providing a stony, mineral foundation for the vines. The climate is continental, cooler than Rome to the south, with warm summers and cold winters.
Vineyards and Farming
The monastery farms five hectares of vines planted in volcanic soils. All harvest work is done by hand, with all 70 nuns of the convent participating in the grape picking. The estate is organically farmed. White varieties include Malvasia, Trebbiano, Verdicchio, and Grechetto; the estate also grows small amounts of Sangiovese, Ciliegiolo, and Merlot for the red wine.
Winemaking
The cellar operates with almost no technology. Fermentations are entirely spontaneous, using only naturally occurring yeasts. The Sisters work with old steel tanks, fiberglass containers of various sizes, and glass demijohns. Wines are bottled without fining or filtration. Coenobium undergoes approximately one week of skin contact before bottling with minimal sulfur; Benedic, the red blend, sees two weeks of maceration.
The Wines
The portfolio is focused: Coenobium, a white blend of Malvasia, Trebbiano, Verdicchio, and Grechetto that shows remarkable texture and mineral salinity; Ruscum, a deeper-colored, more oxidative expression of the same four grapes with orange wine character and notes of wild flowers and anise; and Benedic, a red blend of Sangiovese, Ciliegiolo, and Merlot. Each wine is distributed exclusively in the United States and Japan, making them modest in availability but significant in their influence on the natural wine world.
