Show Notes
My guests for this episode are Marta and Cristina of the the Porto Protocol, which is both a resource hub and community promoting climate action for the global wine ecosystem. Because of the emphasis on community that Marta highlights in this conversation, I recorded a special introduction for it. Here’s the text of it: Glyphosate, the main active component in RoundUp, has been considered to be safe because it acts on the shikimate pathway, and the shikimate pathway is not found in mammals. And since we humans are mammals, glyphosate was deemed virtually harmless to us. But what is a human being? Are we individual organisms? What is a grapevine? What is a tree? Who am I in relation to the world around me? Am I independent of it or completely and utterly dependent on it? The fascinating thing about glyphosate is that it has forced us to realize that we are not individual organisms. We are consortiums of myriad and diverse organisms working as a community. We have more micro-organisms in and on us than there are cells that make up our body. Even the mitochondria, that live inside the cells of our bodies are, in a way, little microbial entities with their own needs and characteristics separate from ours… whoever “We” are. As it turns out, bacteria, fungi, archaea, protozoa, and many other forms of microbial life all have the shikimate pathway, and “we” – this community of life to which we attach our human identities – need all of those other lives to be able to live and thrive. So when we use a substance like glyphosate, and saturate our world with it, and eat it, and drink it with almost every bite of food and sip of wine… what does that do to community of life that we call ourselves? When I use glyphosate I dissolve the foundation of “me.” And so glyphosate has shown us how to use the reductive perspective of science to sell corporate, political agendas. It has shown us how to monetize the omissions of faux-objectivity in an interdependent world. It has shown us how to profit off the ignorance implicit in a disconnected world-view that we bless with peer reviewed studies. The questions we don’t ask about these substances that are being sold to us to make our lives easier are the loopholes of our own dissolution. So when I talk about the soil-plant community (rather than referring to individual “plants”), when I talk about grapevines and trees as community builders, when I use the term “community of life” instead of that human-alienated term “nature,” it’s because this shift in perspective is at the root of the cultural revolution that we need to be able to see what’s happening clearly and make real change that will finally enable us to re-envision and stop the insanity of what we’ve been doing to our community in the name of agriculture. The return to a community perspective is not some feel-good phrasing. It is the revolution. In this episode with Marta and Cristina of the Porto Protocol, Marta talks about how the community aspect, the engagement, the sharing and collaborating, is the most valuable resource of all the resources the Porto Protocol has to offer. I hope what I’ve just said makes this resonate even more deeply as you listen. I hope you boycott glyphosate and all herbicides from wine. I hope you exercise extreme skepticism about anything that promotes reductive thinking, hyper-individualism, and disconnection. I hope you see yourself as a host and steward of legions of lives and begin to ask what it means to be human if being human depends on the survival of all of the lives of this world. A special thanks to Lindsay Valdez for connecting me with Marta and Cristina, and for boldly asking great questions.
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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