Monastero Suore Cistercensi

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Country of Origin: Italy
Location: Lazio
People: Sisters of the Cistercian Monastery, Owners & Winemakers | Giampiero Bea, Consulting Winemaker
Viticulture: Certified Organic

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The wines of Monastero Suore Cistercensi are made by the Sisters of the Cistercian Order who live and work at their monastery in Vitorchiano, ninety minutes or so north of Rome in Lazio. Cistercian nuns has been organically farming their five hectares of vines since the early nineties, but it wasn’t until Giampiero Bea began advising them in the early 2000s that their wines gained a larger audience.

Here, at this quiet religious outpost, eighty nuns organically work vineyards, orchards, and gardens (certified organic by the Associazione Suolo e Salute since 1993). Under the guidance of consulting winemaker Giampiero Bea, they produce wines as honest, sympathetic, and gracious as they are.

Even before Giampiero began helping them gently refine their approach and commercialize their wines—only to the US and Japan, it should be noted—he was struck by the frankness of a white wine produced with almost no technology. In a region rife with highly controlled, highly sulfured concoctions, here was a wine of real character, an unadorned expression of healthy grapes grown in a fascinating volcanic terroir. The “winery” is nothing more than a toolshed packed to the gills with old steel tanks, fiberglass containers of various sizes, and glass demijohns tucked here and there—proving yet again that it takes the barest minimum to produce a wine of character and truth.

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