How To Grow Wine Without Herbicides

My plan for this article was a deeply researched piece about all the advances in tools and cover crop selection and considerations based on a wide variety of contexts, and that included pithy interview quotes and insights from dozens of the world’s thousands of winegrowers who don’t use herbicide. I was going to give you the findings from peer reviewed scientific studies and case studies of the impacts of under vine plants on vine yields and mildew. This was going to present all the data woven together with all the insights from all the contexts in an undeniable and encyclopedic “how-to” breakdown that everyone claims we need before we should make extreme changes like boycotting herbicides in wine.

But when I began thinking about the very first vineyard on my list, Paicines Ranch, where I have personal, hands-on observation from a year of learning from and caring for the vines there, and actually lunch-napping, bird watching, and moon-rise gazing amongst the under vine plants, I immediately realized the effort that would go into producing such a comprehensive article would be a massive waste of time.

“How to grow wine without herbicides” is asking the wrong question. It’s not even in the same world as the questions we should be asking.

Because at Paicines Ranch, I realized, not only is zero herbicide used, not only is no mowing or tilling employed to control plants under the vines, but there is an ongoing process of actively introducing and planting new native plant species both under the vines and all over the vineyard in a continual effort to increase the amount and diversity of plants other than vines.

So asking a vineyard like Paicines Ranch how to grow wine without herbicides is like asking Serena Williams how to hit the most effective badminton net shot. Sure, there are superficial similarities between tennis and badminton, but in reality they are entirely different sports.

When we understand the ecological potential of wine, our entire focus shifts. As I considered the differences between these ways of seeing our winegrowing and how I would talk about this in this article, I happened to listen to an interview with Olivier Hamant. Olivier Hamant is a biologist, the Director of the Michel-Serres Institute, and the author of several books including Antidote to the Cult of Performance, which I feel confident will be on my recommended reading list as soon as I can find an English translation.

Hamant’s vision for wine, or any system, is one in which the central value is not performance but robustness. He presents the absence of optimality as a goal to be achieved in order to strengthen resilience. He shows how plants have low efficiency but a very strong capacity to adapt to change, particularly in a time of crises. Like me, Hamant looks at plants not as problems but as the teachers of the solutions. And I want to give him credit for providing some great inspiration for this piece.

At Paicines Ranch at the peak of the growing season, many of the under vine plants are over a meter tall. And it is a low vigor, dryland site that receives an average of less than 10 inches of rain per year, so it’s drip irrigated, which, yes, gives water to the under vine plants as well. And the vines are widely spaced at 12 x 6 feet. None of these things is optimal for yield per vineyard area, yet the vineyard still produces 2.5 to 4 tons per acre (or over 6 to close to 10 tons per hectare) depending on the variety and age of vines, all of which are vinifera varieties. These aren’t above average amounts, but they’re pretty impressive when you consider all the aspects of this 25 acre or 10 hectare vineyard. Most producers of soulful wine would be happy with those yields.

But if you aren’t happy with these yields, consider that grapes aren’t the only crop that earns income from the Paicines Ranch vineyard. It doesn’t get mowed or tilled, but about twice per year a flock of sheep munch, trample, poop and pee on many of the non-vine plants. If you know anything about rotationally grazing animals, though, you’ll know that the sheep really aren’t there to “control” or “manage” the under vine growth. Sure, they do some suckering, and they’ll eat the tops off of a lot of the plants, but they only get a day or two, three if the vineyard crew has a long weekend and puts them in a bigger paddock, but then they get moved to the next spot. When they leave a spot, the plants still reach over your ankle and often higher. And if they graze in late winter or spring, the plants tend to grow back quickly and perhaps even more lushly.

And that’s the point. Because the grazing isn’t about “controlling weeds.” It’s about building a healthy, robust, and diverse ecosystem. The sheep are intended to enrich, not “manage.” And by every metric they succeed at enriching the vineyard ecosystem, including the unmeasurable metrics of the spiritual and experiential enrichment of those who get to work in the vineyard and see the sheep at play and giving birth and acting silly and cute. And if that cost of that enrichment is a slightly lower yield, consider that the second crop of lamb meat might be factored into the yield from the vineyard.

If there is a “how to” lesson from Paicines, it is the simplest idea in the world of viticulture: Train the vines 1.75 meters high. That’s it. One brilliantly simple design decision makes all of the rest of this multi-income vineyard possible. You wouldn’t even need the sheep really. With vines at this height you could literally use a riding lawnmower, a zero turns mower, in any direction through the vineyard if you wanted to. The vineyard is almost a savanna of vines.

I don’t mean to suggest it’s easy to do the kind of farming that I did and others continue to do at Paicines, nor that there isn’t a huge amount of expertise and care to the viticulture there. But in terms of answering the question, “how do I grow wine without herbicides?” I think that Paicines is showing that if you’re asking that question you’re playing the wrong sport.

To be fair, farming costs have to be taken into account when we consider vineyard yields. It doesn’t matter if you can produce 10 tons per acre if your costs outweigh your income, right? So let me now be brutally honest:

Roundup/Glyphosate may be the cheapest weed management solution for some vineyards in some situations.

Yep, I said it and it’s true. But I didn’t finish. Here’s the rest of it.

Roundup may be the cheapest weed management solution for some vineyards in some situations, but it is also the most costly.

That may sound like an oxymoron, but it is actually a statement of focus, scale, and time. And I need to break this down very carefully now.

Roundup/Glyphosate might be the cheapest weed management solution in some vineyards in some situations… IF (and I’m using all caps because it’s a huge IF):

- IF, first, you only look at the simple price of materials and labor to apply herbicides… while ignoring the global supply chain impact that takes into account the development, manufacturing, marketing, packaging, distribution and sales, regulation, transportation, administration, lobbying, litigation, corruption, obfuscation and misinformation campaigns, and the extraction of resources necessary to fuel and supply all of this, and don’t forget the ongoing environmental and human health impacts and their resulting opportunity loss costs, repair and healing and fatality costs, as well as the many unknown and TBD costs related to these.

- IF, secondly, you only look at the simple price of materials and labor as they appear on the annual budget, while ignoring the full life-cycle timeline of all of the above many other costs which are intergenerational.

- IF, finally, you only look at the simple price of materials and labor as they appear on your annual budget and only as they impact your vineyard, while ignoring the totality of global ecosystems that are impacted for generations by the above many other costs.

If you take these other costs, these huge IFs, into account, and there are pretty significant consequences if we don’t, herbicide use starts to look pretty expensive… and maybe much, much more expensive than we yet know.

And if you were paying attention you might have noticed that I said that herbicide use MAY be the cheapest option in SOME vineyards in SOME situations. There are actually quite a few vineyards and situations where herbicides aren’t the cheapest option even when we willfully ignore all their other full-scale impacts. And we have the ability to turn many dials to be able to make other options cheaper in our vineyards.

Are you spraying herbicide and also fertilizing, and also dropping clusters to reduce yields? Why not cut out all three tasks and let competition balance your yields without multiple inputs? What if you used varieties of grapes that benefitted from reduced productivity? What if we trained vines a meter and a half high to avoid issues with loss of circulation and increase of humidity around the grow zone from letting under-vine plants grow? What if that higher trellis or other trellising changes allowed you to have a second cash crop in your vineyard that made up for any reduced yield from under-vine plant competition? What if we used varieties of grapes that were resistant to fungal issues, thus reducing concerns about circulation and humidity from under vine plants?

These and many other considerations of design, viticultural strategy, and farm management become possibilities and opportunities and new revenue streams when we change the way we evaluate and calculate herbicide use in our vineyards. And if we additionally change what we see as the purpose of growing grapes, the question of this calculation introduces many other vitally important considerations and opportunities that have nothing to do with a spreadsheet comparison of various inputs. If we stop playing the “weed management” game, who cares how cheap it is to do something completely unnecessary?

In other words, a mindset shift is the first step in learning how to grow wine without herbicides. When we have this mindset shift, though, that question will become irrelevant.

Fluctuation, unpredictability, volatility, variability, inconstancy, extremity. These words are no longer future predictions but the present reality of the global life systems that we rely on for our existence, and for our wine. For humans this adds fuel to the fire of our fear, and that fear is beginning to burn with a terrifying intensity. And we are only at the beginning of the rise of these very scary conditions. It’s going to get a lot scarier, I’m afraid.

And so I have a lot of empathy for the fear-induced reactions I’m seeing in wine. We double down on our need to control the things around us, to become more efficient, more productive, and reduce costs and risks. And things are getting harder and more expensive. Money costs more than it ever has, and our margins are tighter. And risks are getting greater, odds are getting longer. And so we evaluate our vineyard management by the bottom line, and by that we mean how much money, if any, we have left over after tallying all our income and expenses for the year. And it really is true, I really feel it when people tell me this, that the only way for some people to get that bottom line to be positive is to use glyphosate and/or other herbicides.

But we are relating to the world in a way that is no longer viable, becuase we are relating to a world that no longer exists, and we are racing to the bottom, accelerating the downward spiral of the old world, by these evaluations and actions. When will we stop playing the game in which we are the sacrificial pawns on corporations’ chess boards?

The real bottom line isn’t economic but ecological. If you evaluate herbicides from an efficiency and productivity framework, it is really hard to beat them. That’s partly because the old economics do not operate within and are not measured by real ecological limits examined within total contexts of holistic and unbounded consequences… those huge IFs I mentioned.

Productivity and efficiency, the gods of the old world, have been limited to invented ideas of fiscal years and profit. But we aren’t playing a profit game anymore. We are playing a real game, a survival game… and that gives us a totally different framework for evaluation.

People talk about our use of these chemicals, really the pursuit of ends that incentivize the use of these chemicals, and how we’re leaving a mess for our children to clean up. But I think that is a very hopeful scenario. The profit game that we’ve been playing is leading to Ecocide. We are destroying the systems that are necessary for children to exist. We aren’t leaving a mess for our children. We are killing them.

When we realize that we are now already engaged in a game of survival, not a game of increased profit and productivity, we begin to evaluate the solutions to our wine problems much differently. Our solutions must arise from local, biological, living systems, not from inputs we get from external sources that we pay to strip-mine the vitality of the earth in a way of relating to this world that I refer to in my upcoming book Wine Liberated as “ecological parasitism.”

The use of herbicide comes from a way of seeing the world that is no longer possible. That kind of wine, that idea of wine, is already gone, and we haven’t yet realized that the rug has been pulled out from under us and the basis for the things that we do in wine is completely transformed at this point. Everything has changed. We aren’t farming for economic survival, we’re farming for actual physical and spiritual survival, and sanity.

We have reached a point in history when unless we humbly acknowledge that the plants we have been trying to control and eradicate are the teachers we need to listen to and learn from, we will not make it. But if we befriend those enemy plants, they can teach us how to design and build life-centered systems that can thrive in extremities and still grow deliciousness. That weed that has developed resistance to Roundup can teach us more than a million peer reviewed studies sponsored by Monsanto.

We no longer need to make wine in service of metrics from an era that is dying, an era during which we mistakenly lived our lives in service of the optimization of material productivity, and all the cheap, quick fixes, like herbicides, that made sense within that value set. All the easy solutions that gave us all of the wicked problems we now have to solve.

The good news is that the survival game, farming in service of life, values diversity. To quote Olivier Hamant, diversity is a form of heterogeneous redundancy. As we grow beyond the era of addiction to increased margins, we get to iterate and innovate and adlib and riff and improvise in service of a plethora of new ends: We have begun the era in which we can now live and make wine for increased meaning, increased health, increased beauty, increased wonder, increased robustness, and increased service to the entire web of life

Our use of the term “management” is the key to our psychology here. The control that we seek with herbicides is an illusion, and it is a dangerous one. The striving for control to allay our fears has in many ways led to the issues that are making our world more terrifyingly uncertain. When we increase the level of control, we ironically increase the fragility of a system… we increase the level of insecurity.

I get that we want security, but the key to security is not control, but serenity. This is the mindset shift. That peace of mind can come from an understanding of biological systems and their robustness, their ability to have built in collaborations, redundancies, back-up plans, and alternative routes, and a diversity of solutions that can’t be overwhelmed even by extreme fluctuations. We can try to control those living systems by killing their, our, community members, or we can try to learn from them and emulate them.

“A robust system is always slightly suboptimal.” That’s another gem from Hamant. What survives is not the most efficient, but the most adaptable, and adaptation takes unfocused play, imagination, fearlessness, joy, and lots of attempts of lots of different things. These are the conditions from which innovation and improvisation – other words for adaptation – can occur. That’s why this mindset shift is so important.

I am using some intense language and heavy ideas, I realize, and I’m doing that for a reason. As much as I am empathetic to the fear response that seems to be guiding some folks who I’m hearing arguing for the use of herbicides in vineyards, or against the boycott of wines grown with herbicides, I’m noticing something else. The reactions I’m hearing from some people aren’t rational and understandable from solely a paradigm of fear.

What I’m hearing from quite a few folks is what you’d hear if you tried to do an intervention with an addict. Outrage, denial, defensiveness, affront, insulting lash-outs, gas-lighting, defiance, emotionally charged bloviating, and opinions asserted as unquestioned, absolute facts. These are the textbook responses of addicts confronted with their addiction.

These winegrowers may be addicted to herbicides, but I think the deeper addiction is to the way of relating to the world that advances and absolves the use of herbicides. The supply of that worldview has run out. The addicts have begun scraping residues from their implements to get their fix. They’ve begun seeking dirtier and riskier supplies. The fiending and terror of withdrawal have begun to take hold.

Because you know what? If you really don’t want to use herbicides there are dozens of ways to grow wine without them. You just actually have to decide to do it.

If you want practical examples, besides Paicines Ranch, there are thousands. Look at Bonterra, who manages close to 1,000 acres of regenerative organic certified vinifera. Zero herbicide, under $20 bottles of delicious wine available across the US and internationally, and they treat their employees well.

But the reality is that for most of us who don’t use herbicide, answering the question of how to not grow wine with herbicide is really boring. It’s irrelevant. It’s like asking a nuclear physicist what 2+2 equals. We can certainly give the answer, but what a waste of time and expertise.

I worked with La Garagista in Vermont, an extremely different context from Paicines or Bonterra, where the under vine plants get mowed or scythed or grazed usually only once per year, at most. When I was harvesting in the La Garagista vineyards the under vine plants weren’t under the vines. They grew up through the canopy, in some cases taller than the top of the trellis. Did this cause mildew issues? Nope. In fact, studies have shown that plants under vines help reduce downy mildew. And that year’s massive growth of non-vine plants may have helped control other issues related to the extremely wet year by helping to evapotranspire water out of the soggy soil. What is the secret to the success of the La Garagista vineyards with their beautifully unruly non-vine plant growth? They grow grape varieties that are resistant to fungal issues. That’s it. One design change again makes herbicides not only unnecessary but also detrimental to the success of the crop.

It would be pointless to try to tell everyone what will work on your site to make the plants other than vines a non-issue, though an elevated trellis and fungal resistant varieties are a great place for any vineyard to start. I mean where did we get the idea that we have to grow vinifera vines on Guyot or VSP trellises 30 inches off the ground? Can we please try something different? Something that allows for other things to live besides vines and vine-obsessed humans? A monoculture is nothing more than a pathogen breeding site.

The point is that growing wine without herbicides isn’t magic. It isn’t a trick. It isn’t some viticultural proprietary secret. It’s freeing your mind and your assyrtiko will follow. The plants other than vines really might not need to be killed at all, by herbicides or by any other method. Maybe those non-vine plants aren’t plants… maybe they’re food. Maybe they’re income generators. Maybe they’re fertility generators. Maybe they’re vine vigor balancers. Maybe they’re fungal combatants and beneficial insect habitat and vine health enhancers and generally extremely valuable members of ecosystems and a global community that has much bigger things at stake than whether your yields are reduced when you stop spraying herbicide. Maybe those under vine plants are the reason we farm wine in the first place.

Evaluate your own site carefully before you think you understand the need to kill plant people. Lots of plant people might be just the thing that your site needs and your vines want for better health and robustness.

And I haven’t even addressed the idea that our idea of wine being limited to only grapes might be another dial we can turn to make competition between our wine crops and other plants a non-issue. I know the idea of grapes is deeply embedded in most people’s psyche when it comes to thinking about wine, and that’s why I’ve focused this on viticulture. But if it’s really true that you can only grow vines optimally by using herbicide, then don’t grow vines. Making wine with grapes is much less important than the health and vitality of the global community of life. Redefine wine before you make the claim that herbicides are necessary, or you are just parroting the precepts of a world that will soon be forgotten.

Here’s a link to the Regenerative Viticulture Foundation’s page about under vine management. But also, you know, just do some online searching. There are lots of options, tools continually improve, new low-growing cover crop seeds become available, and so much more. And there are hundreds of episodes in the Beyond Organic Wine library featuring growers from around the world who somehow have figured out how to grow wine and live a beautiful life, all without using herbicides.

One thing I will recommend against, except as a last resort: weed whacking. I personally hate weed whacking. It sucks for the person doing the work. It inevitably leads to damage to vines and other wine plants. It adds microplastics to your land. It should be a last resort, but it’s still a better option than herbicide. If you have to weed whack, do it as a one-time thing to prep your ground for mulch or because there’s a vole infestation or as a temporary fix before some other longer term solution. Relying on weed-whacking regularly probably means you should change your trellising or some other aspect of vineyard design.

But don’t use herbicides ever. Boycott them. And boycott the wineries that use them because they really have no excuse. The era of excuses is over. We are farming for our lives now. We are growing wine for life.

And the sooner we move beyond silly questions like “how to grow wine without herbicides,” the sooner we can start answering some really big, interesting, and important questions.