St Michael the Archangel,” the prayer card on the bar top reads, “Defend us in battle. Be our defence against the wickedness and snares of the Devil.” I wonder what a group of Pennsylvanian wine moms would think of the reading material if they stumbled into this tasting room in search of a bottle of the New York Finger Lakes’ famous Riesling. Damnation is not exactly fodder for good alcohol sales.
Except, of course, when your largest customer is the Roman Catholic Church. O-Neh-Da Vineyard has been producing the natural grape wines used in Catholic mass for more than 150 years, making it the oldest dedicated sacramental winery in the US.
So, on May 8, when the Sistine Chapel spewed white smoke into the Vatican sky announcing the election of the Chicago-born former Bishop of Chiclayo, Robert Francis Prevost, to the papacy, I sent the winery an email asking about the state of the American sacramental wine industry. The following day, I received a surprisingly enthusiastic reply. “Your timing is impeccable. I am just reaching out to the offices of Cardinals O’Malley and Dolan to offer a donation of O-Neh-Da Authentic Sacramental Wines for Mass Celebrations of our new Pope, Pope Leo XIV, at St Peter’s Basilica.”
Three months later, I found myself on the shores of Hemlock Lake in upstate New York, descending into the winery’s cellars behind the dreadlocked, 6ft-3in figure of Will Ouweleen, the head winemaker at O-Neh-Da and aspiring vintner to the Vatican. “Watch your step,” he told me. “Watch your head too. I don’t take people down here any more.” I understand why as my eyes adjust to the winery’s hazard-strewn, dimly lit crypt.
Having been raised Catholic, I can palate a bit of perdition with my Eucharistic wine. In the arch-roofed cellar, where timeworn 600-gallon puncheons stow annual harvests, the wooden staves have been transformed by use. Red has permeated each inch of the 19th-century lumber and some casks have signs of charring — evidence of the fire and literal brimstone burnt inside each barrel to coat the wood in a layer of antimicrobial smoke.
As a sacramental winemaker, Ouweleen must not only test for alcohol content, he must also prove that the wine is made only from grapes and that it hasn’t soured or turned to vinegar. Canon law mandates it “must be natural from the fruit of the vine and not spoiled” — though the Vatican appears to have endorsed wine containing small quantities of sulphites to be “valid” and “licit”, the two key stamps of approval. Off the bottling room, a door labelled “LABORATORY” opens on to a scene out of an old chemistry textbook. Half-empty bottles of wine scatter the countertop. A metal scaffolding holds up thick and antiquated glassware used to titrate, boil and distil the fermented grape juice.
“The natural act of fermentation has to occur, because to the early Christians, it was a miracle,” Ouweleen said, seated beside the Rastafari Lion of Judah flag.
What natural winemakers are to “Big Wine”, Ouweleen is to mainstream American Catholicism. I can hear his private prep school training in his fluency in the Gospel, but he tells me that he left his ironed khaki pants behind, opting for a black trilby hat and a more musical version of the faith. He’s also got a resume most Dead Heads would die for, working security for Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead for years. When he greets strangers with “Love” on the streets, he seems to speak from both the Catholic and hippy traditions.
In the winemaking world, O-Neh-Da’s approach is what’s called low intervention. No yeast is added to the grape juice. Indigenous yeasts, which live in the winery or on the skins of the grapes, conduct the fermentation spontaneously. This style of winemaking, said Nate Moore, head winemaker of nearby Inspire Moore Winery, “can be challenging in the Finger Lakes because, on average, we will get anywhere from 35 to 38 inches of rain annually . . . So, we get a lot of pressure in the vineyards with downy mildew, powdery mildew and other diseases.” The best way to ensure fermentation goes well in a disease-prone environment is to add bags of industrially produced yeast, something Ouweleen eschews.
Ouweleen’s laboratory desk is covered with papers and books that straddle disparate realms between Catholicism and winemaking, and between running a business and facilitating a miracle of the faith. Above his computer, a copy of Hidden Gems of America: Wineries and Vineyards sits atop The Catechism of the Catholic Church. Beneath an annual catalogue of prices for valves and couplings, Ouweleen had scribbled in permanent marker “Rerum Novarum Leo XIII” — a reference to Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 pro-labour rights encyclical “Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor”. “My favourite Pope,” he admitted.
In the spring of 2015, Ouweleen was out on his tractor mowing the lawn around the vineyard property when he heard of the late Pope Francis’s visit to the US. “There’s no way he’s not going to be coming to the Archdiocese of New York,” he recalled thinking. “He’s got to be coming to St Pat’s [St Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan] which I do not have as a customer to this day!”
He saw the papal visit as a business opportunity to close on a prestigious client. Most of the churches that source wine from O-Neh-Da are clustered around New York, Pennsylvania and other dioceses in the north-east. Ouweleen spends much of his time rumbling around between churches in a white box truck to deliver the wine himself. He hates delivering to New York City, invariably getting parking tickets as he runs in to drop an invoice on a priest’s desk, though he would happily make the drive down for the sake of St Pat’s.
Ouweleen immediately got to work crafting a letter and posted it to the office of Cardinal Dolan, the Archbishop of New York. Under the management of Ouweleen and his wife Lisa, letter writing has become the cornerstone of the winery’s marketing strategy. In the lead-up to sacramental wine’s busy season (the months preceding Advent and Easter), he gets to typing. “I write two letters a year,” he explains. “I hand sign them with a fountain pen. It’s like my journal. It’s a continuing narrative that I tell them, and the churches love it.”
It seems the Cardinal does check his mail. A month later the director of liturgy for Pope Francis’s visit to New York, Reverend Matthew S Ernest, had Ouweleen on the phone. They would accept the donation, but the wine would not grace the altar of St Patrick’s. The cathedral couldn’t fit the 20,000 New Yorkers who would attend.
So it was that on Friday September 25 2015, O-Neh-Da wine was blessed by Pope Francis during the sacrament of communion at Madison Square Garden instead. With a backdrop of hundreds of white-robed choir singers and an entourage of at least a dozen assisting clergy, one bishop removed the cloth purificator placed on the golden chalice engraved with the letters “USA”. The Pontiff placed his hand over the wine and, in Ecclesiastical Latin, blessed the “Chalice Red” that Ouweleen had donated. A line of priests stood before the altar repeating the Pope’s actions over their own chalices and patens of wafers, fanning out through the aisles to distribute the homegrown Eucharist to the masses.
Since I first started calling Ouweleen to discuss the election of the American pope, he had deployed a similar playbook to 2015, mailing off letters to the most prominent clergy in the region and propositioning the Papal Nuncio in Washington DC, the highest representative of the Holy See in the US. He originally intended to donate his sacramental wine to the Vatican for Pope Leo XIV’s first public mass at St Peter’s Basilica (he even had the idea of using the Vatican’s diplomatic pouches to expedite the export of the wine, which can be quite complicated due to regulations on alcohol), but was not successful.
In the weeks before Christmas, Ouweleen emailed me an update: he was already anticipating Pope Leo XIV’s first visit to the US as a second opportunity to donate his wine. He had written to the Papal Nuncio to refresh the offer of a valid and licit, all-American donation. The Vatican has yet to announce plans for a visit stateside.
O-Neh-da vineyard was founded by Bernard John McQuaid, a towering figure in the 19th-century American Catholic Church, and the first bishop of nearby Rochester, in upstate New York. The name came from the Indigenous Seneca name for Hemlock Lake. Father Peter Van Lieshout, Rector of Sacred Heart Cathedral in Rochester, told me the vineyard was a point of local pride for Rochester Catholics. “[Ouweleen] takes very seriously his commitment to making sure that the wine is of quality and of all of the specifications that the church requires, even to the point of making sure that the fermentation process begins with a naturally occurring yeast,” Van Lieshout said.
Despite the local goodwill, business has not been booming. Andrew Laurence, who distributes O-Neh-Da and Californian sacramental wines to churches in Massachusetts, has seen sacramental wine sales dry up. “It was already a business that slowed down before Covid,” Laurence told me. “But since Covid, people are not comfortable with drinking from the same chalice as other people.” The National Shrine of Our Lady of La Leche in St Augustine, Florida, one of the oldest Catholic worship sites in the US and another one of O-Neh-Da’s long-term customers, shuttered their non-profit church supplies business last year in part due to “Post-Covid recovery challenges”.
It is hard to say if O-Neh-Da’s post-Covid struggles are representative of the broader sacramental wine industry, which is dominated by a handful of California-based wineries that declined to comment on recent sales. One small exception is St Joseph Catholic Church in Michigan, which sits on the edge of the wine-growing Leelanau Peninsula. The church produces sacramental wines for a dozen or so parishes in their diocese. “There is a group of priests in our diocese who absolutely want to offer precious blood [in the form of wine] as a species of communion,” Eric Mulvany, St Joseph’s business manager, explained to me over the phone. “Once that Covid and post-Covid slump was over, we have sort of gone back to having our regular sales. Our church offers wine during every mass except during the late winter with cold and flu season.”
Even if the wine is valid and licit in the eyes of the church, mass does not need wine to be complete. It is the clergy’s prerogative. As Father Van Lieshout told me, “It’s always been the case that a bishop has the authority to say whether or not that communion will be distributed under both kinds, that is under the sacred host and from the chalice. And across the country, bishops made the decision at the time of Covid-19, that there would be communion only under one kind, which is perfectly legitimate.” Eucharistic wafers have continued to be offered but the chalice of wine has been slow to return.
For Ouweleen, the church’s post-pandemic stance on the chalice has been troubling. If priests aren’t calling for wine at mass, the parish won’t buy it. He continues to be hopeful that the arrival of an American pope will change things. These past months have brought some succour. “Advent sales are up slightly over last year,” he said, pointing to high demand in Florida in particular, which has rebounded to pre-Covid 19 levels. “I’m counting on Pope Leo . . . And I’m certain, although I don’t know this to be a fact, that once he learns that O-Neh-Da was founded by Bishop McQuaid, who was such an American icon in the Catholic church, he will embrace our generous offer.”
His business plan is evolving. Ouweleen has moved beyond letter writing and now intends to bottle a 10-year-old Cabernet Franc as a special release, called Lux Leonis, The Light of Leo. This bottle of wine, though, will be invalid and illicit, because he has produced it in the style of port, adding in distilled grape spirits. Whereas only registered churches can purchase tax-exempt sacramental wine, Ouweleen wanted to drum up excitement among the laity. They could try a vintage he has nicknamed “the Pope’s Port”.
On my visit I drove Ouweleen half an hour away to the small town of Naples, at the base of Canandaigua Lake. It’s a landscape of corn fields, Amish riding in horse-drawn buggies, apple orchards, small downtowns marked only by post offices and white Methodist steeples, and hills. In Naples, we conducted a tasting with Nate Moore, of the Inspire Moore Winery. When we nosed our glasses of Lux Leonis, the unmistakable richness of the port wine emerged, but Moore notices a touch of oxidation, a common effect of ageing wines. “It’s got good bones,” he assured Ouweleen. “Just clean it up with a bit of sulphites.”
I asked Ouweleen if he was worried that the Italians would critique his wine if it reaches the Vatican. “I can’t imagine what the Italians are thinking of an American Pope, but I love the challenge. So, I say to the Italians, Salute! Bring it on!”
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