Call for a Global Boycott of Glyphosate Wines
Fuck Glyphosate
This was inspired by US President Trump Executive Order of February 18, 2026 and the June 25, 2026 Round-up Ruling by the US Supreme Court Concerning Glyphosate and Glyphosate Labeling.
I’m calling for a total global boycott of any wine grown with herbicides.
I’ve had this boycott for myself for a while, and we’re going to be applying this boycott to the wineries we feature at the Embracing Hybrid Grapes conference. I’m now asking you, every member of the global wine ecosystem - every producer, drinker, and lover of wine - to stop buying, selling, reviewing, or scoring wine that was grown with herbicides.
Here’s why: First, we know that we can grow amazing wine without herbicides in every context where grapes grow. I’ve been interviewing organic winegrowers from around the globe for seven years. There are seven years and hundreds of interviews worth of evidence in the Beyond Organic Wine library for the successful production of wine without herbicides, as well as theoretical and practical knowledge from every possible context about how to actually grow wine without herbicides.
Secondly, we know the use of herbicides decreases the potential quality of wine. Soil health is the primary way that vines can achieve their greatest potential, and the health of soil is drastically and adversely affected by herbicide use. This is because a diverse and healthy soil biology results from a diversity of living plants. Herbicides inhibit terroir. Herbicides inhibit vine health. Herbicides inhibit quality.
Thirdly, we don’t drink wine because we need it to function physically. We drink it to add deliciousness to our lives, to celebrate exceptional moments and everyday specialness, to bond culturally and socially. So it embodies values that are often very different from other things we consume, like food. Instead of survival, wine arises from human psychological and even spiritual needs for joy, love, and beauty. These values are in direct contradiction with the values that incentivize the use of herbicides to produce wine. Herbicides are ugly, anti-social shortcuts. Cheap and easy, they lack the imagination and care that make wine worth drinking.
With these three reasons, I haven’t even mentioned the impact that herbicides have on human health and the health of the entire community of life.
If humanity lives past the 21st Century, we will look back on the use of herbicides in the production of our food as a kind of insanity. But what will be seen not as a kind of insanity but full-blown disconnection from reality, lobotomized and raving insanity will be our use of herbicides to produce the things that are not necessary for human physical survival, like wine. But it’s actually worse than that, because we aren’t insane. We are greedy, selfish, and lazy. We are knowingly and willfully poisoning ourselves, our children, and the entire community of life to save ourselves some time and increase our year-end margins.
Have you seen that cartoon that’s going around of the guy in a tattered business suit sitting with a few children next to a campfire, in what we come to understand is a post-apocalyptic setting? And the man in the tattered suit is telling the kids, “Yes, we destroyed the world, but we significantly increased shareholder profits.”
Plants are the primary keystone species on earth. They are the reason nearly every other form of life can exist. That we live in a time in which we douse the majority of our food and wine producing lands, as well as forests, towns, cities, parks, and neighborhoods with substances meant to kill the most important lifeforms in the known universe speaks to the extent to which we have utterly lost our minds to the hubris of human exceptionalism.
There are many kinds of herbicides. In the Midwest US the use of 2-4D and Dicamba is so pervasive, as are the issues of its defoliating nature spreading on the wind far beyond the borders of the farms where it’s sprayed (aka “drift”), that many grape growers living in the corn, soy, and wheat belt of the US have given up on trying to grow grapes because of how frequently their vineyard is decimated by a neighboring farmer’s herbicide use. The use of pre-emergent herbicides is written into business plans of establishing nearly every new farm of any kind, including winegrape farms. And rising from the center of this toxic global pool of herbicides is the most insidious of all: glyphosate.
Why is glyphosate the most insidious? Because it is the cheapest and marketed to be the safest. Because of this it is the most used pesticide on earth. Over 300 million pounds of it are sprayed annually not only onto the food we eat and wine we drink, but onto our children’s playgrounds, public parks, urban and rural roadsides, and all kinds of publicly owned or governmental properties around the world as well as on millions of acres of forest.
If you buy literally anything from a grocery store that isn’t certified organic, it was almost certainly grown in soil that was sprayed with glyphosate. If you eat any kinds of nuts or nut products - almond milk, nut butters, Nutella, baklava, chocolate with nuts, and more - they were grown in nut orchards in which the ground is completely denuded by herbicide – usually glyphosate. If you eat any kind of grain or grain product – any cereal or granola, oat milk, oatmeal, tortilla chips and tortillas, bread of any kind, baked deserts of any kind, corn on the cob, and many more – you can assume the soil was treated with glyphosate. Let’s not forget that our meat is grown on grain feed, so all that glyphosate gets passed onto your chicken, pork, and beef. In the case of wheat products like all breads and many cereals, glyphosate is often used as a desiccant and is actually sprayed onto the wheat itself, just before harvest. The same amount of glyphosate is used on soy and soy products like tofu, edamame, soy milk, and again beef, chicken, and pork. The same goes for chocolate and coffee: if you aren’t buying organic, it was grown in soil that gets regularly doused with glyphosate.
We are saturated in glyphosate. It literally falls from the sky with the rain. North Americans consume more glyphosate than anyone. The increase of diseases, chronic illnesses, diabetes, mental health disorders, and more over the last 40 years corresponds directly with the increased use of glyphosate and other pesticides in our food systems. And there are intergenerational impacts that we are just beginning to understand… and they aren’t good. They’re the opposite of good.
My goal here isn’t to convince anyone that glyphosate is bad for human health, though. I’m pretty convinced your political stance, rather than science, has a lot more to do with your convictions about glyphosate’s harmfulness. But if you are convinced that glyphosate is bad for the world, I want you to understand how pervasive it is, and I want you to make a choice about your survival. It’s time to start refusing to support wineries that use glyphosate or herbicides of any kinds.
I know we give a lot of leeway to farmers. We acknowledge that everyone farms in different contexts and surviving as a farmer can be incredibly challenging. But it’s time to stop extending that grace to the use of herbicides in wine.
We also need to start calling out sustainability certifications that allow the use of herbicides, and there are many. There is nothing sustainable about herbicide use. To sustain the health of an ecosystem you must farm in such a way that you continue to keep it at the same level of health and productivity, at least. But herbicides continually degrade ecosystem health and diminish the fertility and productivity of the land year after year. There are even regenerative certifications that allow herbicides, which is joke. And we should laugh at these certifications publicly and loudly. This is why Organic, Biodynamic, and Regenerative Organic are the gold standards of certification for wine. Despite some of their potential issues, they are unified in their prohibition against glyphosate and other chemical herbicides.
Some people have begun to take a public stance about wine bottle weight. Most famously, Karen MacNeil has refused to review wines submitted in unnecessarily heavy bottles.* It’s time all of us who don’t use glyphosate ourselves or want it in our wines start taking the same public stance with regard to wines produced using glyphosate or any other herbicide. We should not review them, we should not score them, we should not sell them, and we should not drink them. It’s time we start defining a great wine in a way that includes how it was grown, and it’s time that we exclude herbicide from what can be called great or even good viticulture.
Please join me in boycotting wine grown using glyphosate or herbicides of any kind.
Fuck Glyphosate.
If this is something you care about, and you choose to commit to this boycott, spread the word. Post about this boycott. Publicize it. This is an issue just like bottle weight in which there are no good excuses for the use of herbicides in wine. This needs to be made very public.
#boycottglyphosatewine #boycottroundup
The time for letting wine producers who use glyphosate feel comfortable are over. It’s time to make them feel very uncomfortable. It’s time for some serious peer pressure. I’d rather deal with a little discomfort than the continual poisoning of the earth to make this beverage that I love.
Seriously… fuck glyphosate.
https://stokewines.au/ (Special love to Nick Dugmore)
https://nomoreglyphosate.nz/glyphosate-chronic-disease-connection/
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/24-1068_n7ip.pdf
https://www.centralaswine.com/blog/glyphosate-isnt-bad-its-horrendous
*Please note: With apologies, this was corrected because it originally incorrectly stated that Jancis Robinson will not review heavy bottles. From Jancis: “…Our policy is to publish the weight of full bottles on JancisRobinson.com when possible… We recently introduced the ability to search our nearly 300,000-strong database of wine reviews by bottle weight…”
But how do you know? The reality is that you don’t. You can make a strong educated guess, but even if the specific grower or winery doesn’t use fruit treated with glyphosate (actually, the weeds, not the fruit or vines directly….that would be stupid), there is plenty of evidence that it works its way into the global grape and wine supply system regardless. “In 2019, the https://pirg.org/edfund/resources/glyphosate-pesticide-in-beer-and-wine/ tested through a range of grocery store wines and beers. Of the 20 beverages tested, 19 contained glyphosates.” Can we trust the EPA? No! Can we trust the majority of sustainability certification organizations? No! Can we trust growers to honestly communicate what they are or aren’t doing? Typically, no!; especially not the conglomerates and larger producers of retail wines. So, we can boycott glyphosate as well as growers and producers that use fruit grown with glyphosate for weed control. Like all things in the sphere - Know your farmer! Know your winery! Eat organic (the majority of the glyphosate in the world is used on corn and soybeans) to reduce your exposure. And of course push push push for change. Is glyphosate dangerous? Of course it is, otherwise the corporations and farm organizations that pushed for the legal shield wouldn’t have cared one bit. They know it causes human health problems, is bad for the environment, our food supply, and YOU!