The UnCorker

Weird Wine(s) of the Week- 2007 Coenobium & Coenobium Rusticum Monastero Suoro Cistercensi

July 1, 2009 | In WINE REVIEWS | 1 Comment

Coenobium is latin; in this sense it refers to communal monasticism, or cenobitic living. This blend of malvasia, grecchetto, verdicchio and trebbiano is an organically produced beauty from the Lazio hills, north of Rome, and qualifies as WWOW for a bunch of reasons.

The first and most obvious being the producers themselves; nuns- that’s right, sisters. Living cenobitically, as it were. Lives given over to prayer, worship and communal labor. Living modestly on the produce they can grow, or in this case, vinify.

If we UnCorker’s had a time machine(and what we wouldn’t give for that) we could go back to a time long ago when religious orders kept viticulture alive. As you’ve read in these pages, after the fall of the Roman Empire, during the dark ages, it was the church that kept all that the Roman’s had learned about viticulture alive. Today, we don’t think twice about drinking beer made by Belgian Trappists, but wine made by nuns- weird.

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Weird Wine of the Week-NV Bermejo Brut Nature

April 22, 2009 | In WINE REVIEWS | No Comments

These are boom times for the Canary Islands, emigration to the U.S. and E.U. has slowed, meaning the depopulation of the archipelago has stopped, the government has started subsidizing the wine industry in an effort to move it forward, and has had a measure of success, and most importantly, Anthony Bourdain has visited with his show, No Reservations, making the world aware that the place exists, and that people live and work there.

Traditionally, viticulture in the Canary Islands was focused on sweet wines, often called Malmsey, for export; Shakespeare called it “an absolutely penetrating wine,” in Henry IV. Robert Louis Stevenson writes that “a little good canary will comfort me the heart of it.” The Duke of Clarence, brother of Edward IV, drowned in a barrel of Malmsey in 1478. With modern tastes turning from sweet wines, vintners in the Canaries had mostly focused on crappy mediocre dry wines for the tourist trade, and almost none of their production was exported anywhere. The last decade has seen some big changes, modernization, and the number of denominated zones(do’s) making wine of real character. Lanzarote, the island farthest east is where our WWOW hails from. It is on the forefront of the Canaries wine revolution, and Bodegas los Bermejo is one leading the charge.

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