The incoming 2024 vintage marks 20 years of joyous partnership with the incredible sisters of Monastero Suore Cistercensi. This convent of 70 Cistercian nuns has been organically farming their five hectares of vines in Vitorchiano, Lazio, since the mid-1990s, but it wasn’t until our friend Giampiero Bea began advising them in the early 2000s that their wines gained a larger audience. Today, a ravenous US fanbase eagerly awaits each new release of “the nun wine,” and we at Rosenthal Wine Merchant cannot come close to satisfying the enormous demand.
Each time we visit with the sisters, we are amazed by their warmth of spirit, their serene energy, and the spartan nature of their operation. 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 of cellar gadgetry to produce an honest wine of real character.
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 an unadorned and exuberant expression of healthy grapes grown in a fascinating volcanic-soiled terroir.
After 2023’s devastating growing season—the sisters lost nearly their entire crop and had to seek nearby fruit sources for “Coenobium” (no “Ruscum” was made)—2024 smiled upon them, yielding a full crop of healthy fruit with terrific balance and moderate alcohol levels. While Coenobium and Ruscum can diverge quite significantly in character depending on vintage, in 2024 they show a through-line of freshness wed to inner warmth and an undercurrent of notable saltiness; the red “Benedic” is broader than usual with plumper and deeper fruit, but imbued with the same balletic freshness as the whites.
Grower Spotlights
Since coming home to work at his family’s domaine full-time in 2018, Paul Fumoso—with mom Stéphanie by his side—has steered Gour de Chaulé to new heights, and the wines of this stalwart Gigondas estate are more popular stateside than ever.
Grower Spotlights
Rather than crafting their lineup to accommodate perceived market demand, Philippe and Vincent allow the character of the growing season to dictate which wines they produce from a given harvest.
Grower Spotlights
In Jacques’ modest cellar beneath his house in Montigny-les-Arsures, Emeric learned the virtues of restraint and the value in trusting one’s fruit; he learned to act as shepherd rather than “winemaker,” and his wines at Les Matheny embody that philosophy arguably more emphatically than even Puffeney’s did.
