Show Notes
The objective of this episode is to get vital information out to winegrowers everywhere about Pierce’s Disease, or Xylella fastidiosa (and you’ll get a whole lot more as well). Pierce’s Disease/Xylella fastidiosa isn’t a new concern for many winegrowers, but it has recently hit the news in a way that has whipped up a frenzy of new attention in California… and much of that attention is misguided, will actually cause more harm, and will incentivize the spread of Pierce’s Disease. So Drew and I recorded this conversation to serve as a resource for California especially, but also for the world… as Pierce’s Disease was found in Europe over 10 years ago, and it will likely spread globally. And it can kill vineyards. If you haven’t listened to it, I also recently released a short episode called “Is Pierce’s Disease the New Phylloxera?” This Substack is entirely reader-supported. This is a free episode because of the urgency of the issues discussed. If you’d like to keep important information like this avaialable for everyone in wine, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.
In this conversation with Drew Herman, Viticulturist at Barbour Vineyard Management in Napa and Sonoma, we do a comprehensive examination of the issues surrounding and related to Pierce’s Disease, and in doing so we cover topics that apply to everything related to growing wine. Even if you don’t have to worry about Pierce’s Disease where you are, this conversation has a huge amount of information that will be relevant to everyone in wine. We dig into bacteriophages, the difference between tolerance and resistance. how pd/xf affects a vine and how the vine reacts to it, what causes it and facilitates its spread, why aren’t our vines able to deal with it and what about our vines or the way that we grow them makes them so sexy and attractive to sap sucking insects? And the real reasons the news is vilifying “immigrant” bugs. We also find out about how our nutritional mistakes and practices can help or harm plants and dial insect predation up and down, why sap analysis and foliar feeding are potentially especially important for vines on rootstock, why rootstock affects your wine pH, the importance of the timing of nutrition, how trellising incentivizes vegetative growth and billables and insect predation, the importance of sex and the need to breed new grapes and crowdsource breeding... because this is bigger than institutions. We also reveal the once in a lifetime opportunity that is available for a brave CA Winery… maybe it could be you? Resources mentioned in this episode: Wine Liberated: The Ecological Revolution and the Vintners Inspiring Change Is Pierce’s Disease the New Phylloxera? Genetic Analysis of North American Vitis Species Related to Pierce’s Disease Annie Bruno PD/Xf Thesis Cost Analysis of PD/Xf to California Research into the effectiveness of XylPhi-PD Bacteriophage inoculation This Substack is entirely reader-supported. To get access to all posts and support Beyond Organic Wine, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Thank you!
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More from Beyond Organic Wine
Here’s a quick mention of a few upcoming things that I’ll say more about in the future: First, the book release party for my book Wine Liberated will be held in Ithaca, NY at Autumn Leaves Bookstore on November 14th. Wine will be served. It’s an anarchist book store. I’ll be there, trying to inspire a new odyssey for the next century of wine exploration. Second, the Embracing Hybrid Grapes conference is happening February 21-22 at UC Davis and in Berkeley at the Donkey & Goat winery. Tickets will go on sale in a month-ish, and we are looking for sponsors and hybrid wine producers who want to showcase their herbicide free wine to a thirsty west coast. Third, I’m going to MC Undercurrent 2027, which is THE organic and biodynamic wine conference in New Zealand, maybe the entire southern hemisphere. It’s June 1-3 in Queenstown, and the amazing Alica Anderson of Amvive will be the keynote speaker. Finally, please subscribe at beyondorganicwine.substack.com to support this podcast and all the work of Beyond Organic Wine. Thank you! At this point in history, Halloween 2026, talking about the very scary crisis in agriculture, especially in the US, may be like being on the Titanic and brining attention to the fact that the boilers are flooded. It’s true, and it’s a seriously serious issue… but it’s merely a symptom of much bigger issues. So I start this episode with a quote from my guest as a reminder of where our focus needs to be. I started a boycott of glyphosate and all herbicides in wine because it is an important statement that we don’t need to tolerate discussion about this anymore. The known knowns of glyphosate are utterly damning, and even though there are certainly many unknowns, they give zero reason to excuse its use. And yet this boycott doesn’t solve the larger issues. And Dr. Michelle Perro reminds us of the power and responsibility we have as agents of change, as instigators and initiators. But we need to speak up, stand up, and own our capacity to re-engage with our communities in not letting our lives be dictated by corporations who seek short-term material gain and the power to protect and increase their profit-making ability despite its devastating effects on humans and all of the lives with whom we share this world. Wine invites us to think about the future. We make decisions today in wine that we know we won’t taste, in some cases, for years. Wine asks us to think long-term. To think perennially. To think about systems that exceed our own brief lifetimes. I find it ironic that we think we can’t live and make wine without these novel chemicals that were only invented a few decades ago, that are harmful for us in multiple, intergenerational ways, when our wine cultures were developed over thousands of years without fossil fuels, let alone chemistry, I know it isn’t easy to farm ecologically, but easy is only a short term solution, and short term thinking seems to have created some long term problems. We find ourselves deeply invested in an approach to winegrowing that is only possible with chemicals. But that doesn’t make those chemicals good or wise, and examples to the contrary, the hundreds of folks I’ve interviewed for this podcast, prove that these chemicals are not the only way to grow grapes commercially. I know that there can be pretty extreme consequences to weaning off some of these things when there aren’t other easy alternatives, and it would suck to be the people who bear the burden of those consequences in our lifetime. But I think those consequences can be felt voluntarily by us now or they can be felt by our children involuntarily, because agricultural approaches that are only possible with chemicals are not sustainable in the long term. If you haven’t read my post, How To Grow Wine Without Herbicides, please do. My guest is Dr. Michelle Perro. Dr. Perro is a veteran pediatrician with over four decades of experience in acute and integrative medicine, co-founder and CEO of GMOScience, a 501(c)(3) no
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For those of you in the Northern Hemisphere, Happy Harvest, Merry Samhain, and a Celebratory Equinox to you all wherever you are. This episode is about Magic, the cunning arts that have been practiced for millennia in most cultures.
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit beyondorganicwine.substack.com
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit beyondorganicwine.substack.com