Yahoo News leads this morning with a story about California Trappists that have started to make wine. I tried to find if there's a place where I could order the wine on-line, but they don't appear to have gotten that far. Here's their wine promo, which features this quote from St. Benedict:
We read that monks should not drink wine at all, but since the monks of our day cannot be convinced of this, let us at least agree to drink moderately, and not to the point of excess, for wine makes even wise men go astray Sir 19:2).
So what is excess? Hard to say, but it might be excessively more than our definition:
St. Benedict in his rule ordered that each monk be given a measure of wine a day; in Medieval England, that measure was considered to be a gallon, so English monks must have been quite merry, indeed.
