Abbey of New Clairvaux

The Abbey of New Clairvaux is a rural Trappist monastery located in Northern California in the small town of Vina in Tehama County.

[1] The farmland, once owned by Leland Stanford, grows prunes, walnuts, and grapes that the monks harvest from the orchards and vineyards to sustain the community.

[2] The setting is extremely quiet and the monastery is completely hidden behind a wall that separates the guest and extern quarters and the monastic enclosure.

Guests are welcome to join the monks in the chapel to chant the Divine Office seven times per day, beginning with Vigil at 3:30 a.m. and ending with Compline at 7:35 p.m. California Governor Jerry Brown is known to visit the Abbey.

[4] The community reassembled what the monks call their "Sacred Stones", the limestone blocks from the 800-year-old chapter house (meeting room) of the Cistercian monastery of Santa Maria de Ovila that once stood in Trillo, Guadalajara, in Spain.

Father Thomas Davis eventually made a deal with the city to get the 1,300 leftover stones and handle the reconstruction of the church.

The cuttings of those Greek varieties were imported in the USA in 1948 by Harold Olmo, grape breeder at the University of California, Davis, where they were stored until the abbey of New Clairvaux took interest in the 2000s.