Nunya Business, It’s Theirs

April 16th, 2024

Back in roughly 2012 when I was a dozen years younger and two dozen pounds lighter I had decided it would be fruitful to take a series of courses at the Philly Wine School. This was back in the days when they were up on Fairmount Ave and I was parking by the Eastern State Penitentiary, cheerful backdrop, truly. One of these courses was an 8 week series of Italian wine, some conventional, some less so.

On one of the less conventional evenings, a white(ish) wine caught my attention. The winery was Monastero Suore Cistercensi and the wine was their Lazio Bianco Coenobium. It’s a blend of local grapes Trebbiano, Malvasia, and Verdicchio and the unique quality about this wine is that the juice is left in contact with the grape skins for about 2 to 3 days much like would be done in the production of a red wine. True believers may recall a column that I wrote about orange wine in recent history, so this concept may sound familiar, but back in 2012 the term “orange wine” hadn’t entered common wine speak.

I was taken aback, the wine smelled like nothing that I had ever experienced in a white, with aromas that at the time were reminiscent to me more of a Belgian Tripel-style beer than an Italian white wine. I since haven’t had that exact same experience with the aromatics, but it does still beguile at times with its diverse array of aromas and unique texture. I immediately wanted to know who was responsible for this curiosity.

Keen eyed linguists may have noticed the word Monastero in the title of the winery, an easy cognate to the English monastery. About an hour and a half north of Rome, a Trappist order of Cistercian nuns quietly do their thing, prayer and the like, along with producing jams, honey, assorted agricultural goods, and now wine. It was back in the early 2000s that Paolo Bea and his son Giampiero, from neighboring Umbria, got hooked up with these nuns offering some technical winemaking advice, but avoided directing them stylistically.

While much of the winemaking in Lazio is highly industrialized the nuns have a notably low-tech operation by contrast. Wine making is essentially conducted in what amounts to a shed with stainless steel tanks and glass carboys, with fermentation happening spontaneously with native yeasts that come in on the grapes. Because of this approach they farm their land organically, and add minimum amounts of SO2 at bottling.

Anybody suffering from the current Chartreuse shortage may know that these religious artisan types only make enough of their products to support the monastery, these aren’t highly commercialized operations. As such they don’t make a lot of wine at Monastero Suore Cistercensi and the majority of what they do make is exported to the US, with some going to Japan.

After tasting the Coenobium at this wine class, I sought it out immediately, finding out that it was available in our area and State Line has been carrying the wine ever since. The Coenobium beguiled, but it was one of their other “whites” that really grabbed my attention, their Coenobium Ruscum. The second of these wines goes through a much more dramatic 15 day skin contact regiment, resulting in a more deeply colored, lightly tannic orange wine reminiscent of Ribolla Gialla from the Italian / Slovenian border. If the Coenobium is for hors d’oeuvres, the Ruscum is for the main feast, assertive enough to pair with foods that most white wine would shy away from.

These aren’t focus group wines. Some multi-million dollar corporation didn’t gather a few dozen people to figure out how much mega purple, or powdered tannin, or tartaric acid, or how much unfermented grape juice to add back in to (quietly) make a “dry” wine seem less dry. These are nuns quietly letting juice ferment to its own devices, creating wine that doesn’t seek to grab a market share of a particular demographic, it is a wine that just is.

-Joe Buchter, Import Wine Buyer

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