The New Yorker:

It is an everyday miracle, mysterious and beguiling, and it is replicated several thousand times over, at all hours, in churches that are beautiful and churches that are not. The priest consecrates the bread, and then he consecrates the wine, and there on the altar the meal becomes the body and blood of Christ. Then, just as Jesus broke bread and shared wine with the apostles at the Last Supper, believers rise from the pews, receive the host, eat it, and, one by one, drink the Precious Blood, putting their lips to the same cup.

That last part doesn’t happen these days. Churches are closed and services have been moved online, for one, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has also advised against it. Before the pandemic, William Ouweleen had drunk from such a cup countless times. A vintner in the Finger Lakes region of New York, he used to attend mass and receive communion at St. Matthew Church, in Livonia, where the Precious Blood in the chalice had been a blush-colored wine that he’d made. Ouweleen runs a winery named O-Neh-Da, which makes sacramental wine that churches use to celebrate the Eucharist. The winery, which is next to Hemlock Lake—“o-neh-da” is the Seneca word for “hemlock”—is the go-to for Catholics in the Northeast. When Pope Francis visited New York City, in 2015, he used O-Neh-Da wine for a mass at Madison Square Garden.

In contrast to regular wine, which might be made with extra yeast, tannin powders, and flavorings, Communion wine must be “natural, from the fruit of the grape, pure and incorrupt, not mixed with other substances,” according to Vatican instructions. So, last fall, Ouweleen, a self-described “hippie” who is fifty-eight and wears his hair in dreadlocks, did what he does every fall: he harvested forty acres’ worth of grapes, trucked them to his winery, crushed them, and allowed them to ferment with no additives. (Except, that is, for some added sulfites, just before bottling—a preservative sanctioned by the Vatican.)

Go to link