Show Notes
What I want to say in this piece is urgent. It’s urgent because of the recent discovery of sharpshooters on grapevines at several Costco locations in Northern California, where most of California wine is grow. It’s also urgent because Pierce’s Disease is a very serious plant disease that affects grapevines, perhaps as serious as Phylloxera, and I’ll get more into that. And it’s also urgent because the response to this situation is already proving to be as short-sighted and destructive as the disease itself. I have been talking about the urgent need to prepare for the spread of Pierce’s Disease for some time now. I recorded a conversation with Adam Tolmach of The Ojai Vineyard, in which Pierce’s Disease is the main subject. And I wrote about Pierce’s Disease in my book, Wine Liberated. When I wrote about it, now almost a year ago, I had no idea it would be so timely. But I can’t wait for the book to come out, so I’m doing this and other presentations as resources for California winegrowers, and soon winegrowers from other areas as well. Pierce’s Disease has made it to Europe. What I hope comes of this is that we reach out to the same politicians, Adam Schiff and Alex Padilla, who are asking for millions of dollars to “contain and eradicate” sharpshooters, and propose some long-term solutions that are actual solutions instead of just temporarily throwing money at something to assuage constituents yet accomplish little other than further ecological destruction. First, Is Pierce’s Disease the New Phylloxera? In some ways, no, but in some very serious ways, yes, it is. While Phylloxera is a root louse, Pierce’s Disease or Xylella fastidiosa, which I will refer to as PD for the most of rest of this piece, is a bacterial infection that can infect many plants including grapevines. PD is transmitted by insects to plants, and then the bacteria does the damage that causes vine death, while the actual phylloxera bug is the cause of vine death because it eats vine roots. But both can result in vine death. I say “can” because just like with phylloxera, Vitis vinifera has zero adaptation to resist or tolerate Pierce’s Disease. Vitis vinifera, of course, is the species of grapevine that accounts for most of the wine grown in California. The reason it has no adaptation to resist either PD or phylloxera is because it’s not from here where PD and phylloxera evolved. The majority of our wine grapes were brought over from Europe and are highly susceptible to the many insects, disease, and fungi that evolved on North America. However, there are several species of grapevines from California and the Southern United States and Mexico that have evolved adaptation to resist and tolerate Pierce’s Disease. Vitis Arizonica, Vitis Girdiana, Vitis Candicans aka Mustangensis, Vitis Cinerea, and Vitis Rotondifolia aka Muscadina, Vitis Cordifolia, and Vitis Monticola are among the species that have some degree of Pierce’s Disease tolerance or resistance. And all of these species have this PD resistance because sharpshooters and Pierce’s Disease are as endemic to this continent as are these grapevine species. So I want to first point out that the problem is not, as I’m hearing in the press, that sharpshooters are an “invasive pest” issue. Yes, glassy-winged sharpshooters came from the Southeastern US and are not native to California, but California has at least two other native species of sharpshooters that transmit PD – the bluegreen sharpshooter and the redheaded sharpshooter. These are not invasive, and our native species are not wine’s problem. The issue is that we have a wine industry built on vines without the genetic preparation for our normal, local native fauna. This is a really important and urgent point to get across to our politicians. Because the way a large percentage of those millions of your tax dollars are going to be spent is to remove insect habitat, that is to kill plants, with herbicides and to kill insects with insecticides. These are the m
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