  Quarkonium-nucleus systems are composed of two interacting hadronic states
without common valence quarks, which interact primarily through multi-gluon
exchanges, realizing a color van der Waals force. We present lattice QCD
calculations of the interactions of strange and charm quarkonia with light
nuclei. Both the strangeonium-nucleus and charmonium-nucleus systems are found
to be relatively deeply bound when the masses of the three light quarks are set
equal to that of the physical strange quark. Extrapolation of these results to
the physical light-quark masses suggests that the binding energy of charmonium
to nuclear matter is B < 40 MeV.
