Abbey of New Clairvaux

Abbey of New Clairvaux is a living Trappist monastery founded in 1955 in Vina, northern California. Its most extraordinary feature is the ongoing 'Sacred Stones' project: hundreds of 12th-century carved stones from the Spanish Cistercian monastery of Óvila — purchased by William Randolph Hearst in the 1930s and shipped to California in crates — are being painstakingly reassembled into a Romanesque chapter house on the monastery grounds. The monks also operate a working winery, selling estate wine under their own label. Visitors may enter the church, browse the monastery store, and walk the quiet agricultural campus — an improbable meeting point of medieval Spanish masonry and California wine country.