Alan, thanks for sharing this story. When I was in Champagne last May visiting Pierre Gerbais, we had driven up the hill in Celles sur Ource and we were talking about his philosophy and during our talk, another vineyard was spraying this crap and he says to me, “Look, we gotta move and get out of here”. He doesn’t use the stuff, nor does his neighbor Cedric Bouchard. This stuff is nasty for us and I feel better everyday when I see vineyards converting away from this stuff. Buying and drinking organic and bio wines doesn’t ensure that your wines in your glass are free of this shit but if we support people who are moving in this direction, we are helping to reduce its use and the potential affects it has for us as consumers.
Yeah Yeah Yeah . . .
We see an article like this every few months now.
Much ado about nothing me thinks - though really really large vineyards probably do add a good dose of Roundup to control the vines.
I will say that more folks seem to be having ‘health issues’ with wines, and these seem to be ‘lower end’ ones. Coincidence?
And Frank, one thing to remember - many non-BD or organic vineyards despite this stuff as well and do not use it.
Cheers
I purchased my property in late 1999. I lived in Silicon Valley and was just a weekender. So the gardeners and vineyard management company did their work on the weekdays, and when I would arrive on Fridays I would see the results of their work. One was the use of Round-Up to kill any weed anywhere. They did not even turn off the sprayer when they walked across the yard to another part of the yard- you could see the yellowed greenery from the row of rose bushes to the row of fruit trees. Ditto for the vineyard.
That is when I went organic. The use of herbicides is forbidden on my property and has been since 2001. Weeds are hand-dug from between the vines, and tractors dig up the earth between the vine rows. It is my commitment to making my land and my product as organic as I can. But you can drive up and down the roadways and see the yellow strips along the vine rows. Some I believe are pre-emergent sprays, and some are killers of vegetation that has already developed.
I think it is disgusting.
What Frank said, +1.
Glyphosate is a difficult one when trying to separate the wood from the trees. Manufactured by Monsanto, a company that supposedly disseminates all sorts of propaganda over every media channel you can think of, yet there isn’t a single reliable study that suggest glyphosate is particularly toxic over the short or long term. The best impartial resource I’ve found on its toxicity is Glyphosate toxicity: Looking past the hyperbole, and sorting through the facts. By Credible Hulk – The Credible Hulk
The critical point is that it’s harmless if applied properly. Unfortunately consumers can’t really rely on that happening.
Nevertheless, wine is a luxury product rather than a right at all times for me, so I don’t think using herbicides has a place - accounting for proper environmentally friendly farming practices should be in the price of all wines, and I don’t think it’d be a bad thing if worldwide consumption went down accordingly with that increase.
I am not surprised at this news as it was the standard solution herbicide globally for many decades, wine is just the latest story…
Rachel Carson types, we really need you to sound the horns and ring the alarm bells NOW!
Yes that is going back a while, but as someone who took the new science course, Ecology, in the 60’s it has been part of me for over 50 years. Now we do not even have a functioning EPA which arose story thereafter, WTF! And our Secretary of Agriculture?!? Fogetabout it!
The bee colony collapse puzzle was the first warning for me that something was really wrong.
There is so much more to uncover and learn about this poison such as this University of Texas study
And the bigger picture:
Science | AAAS.
From the folks who brought us Agent Orange, not just muthafckers , fckers of all of us, truly.
We need to be very cranky about this stuff.
I thought you drank wine to avoid cancer
For some context…Glyphosate is in the ground water in most Ag areas, because of widespread use. So yeah, it’s in wine, organic or not. It’s also in most other things you eat. In very very tiny quantities.
Good antidote for the toxins in termite fog?
I think there is a fundamental human drive to create existential fear, and now that predators, war, disease, famine, etc. have diminished, we are assigning greater and greater fear over the ever-smaller incremental risks we face in life.
A statistical/physiological review of this topic: Safety evaluation and risk assessment of the herbicide Roundup and its active ingredient, glyphosate, for humans - PubMed
Same thing, different portal: Safety Evaluation and Risk Assessment of the Herbicide Roundup and Its Active Ingredient, Glyphosate, for Humans - ScienceDirect
If you watch Nancy Grace, you might likely believe that a young blonde student is killed every 15 seconds in Aruba.
This next link is not about RoundUp, but is a good read for how we look at things like risk: https://setac.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/etc.5620170112
The “Precautionary Principle” is a good term, but anything that falls short of “infinity” in terms of looking at any substance is impossible. Then, instead of hand wringing, we each need to find where on that statistical curve we want to exist.
The last place you should rely on to get data is from a product’s manufacturer…but you can look this over and check where they get their information: Safety Evaluation and Risk Assessment of the Herbicide Roundup and Its Active Ingredient, Glyphosate, for Humans - ScienceDirect
The other last place you should look is to the tinfoil hat crowd who make the most outlandish claims about their grievances…like in the article that starts this thread. A good science trick is to read through an article and look for histrionic or overtly connotative/emotional language and adjective selection when an author is addressing his/her ideas. It’s pseudo-scientific purple prose in the article up top. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be allowed to pull your hair out over RoundUp sneaking into your wine, just saying that if you stop with reading the Live Love Fruit article and feel satisfied, then you are being lazy.
There are many great articles that an honestly interested person could sift through and grow and opinion rather than falling into the adjective trap that is the top article.
_
All that being said, as a consumer, I feel I have a right to know what is in the products I buy or consume, then let me decide how to proceed. “RoundUp content” would be very awesome to see on wine labels and let the marketplace decide how to best proceed!
I favor full transparency and disclosure.
_
For the people here in the business, have you had any of your wines screened for Round Up content? If so, what did you find?
Would you be willing to commit to listing RoundUp content on your labels?
For the people who are most alarmed by this, how does it affect your plans for drinking wine? Or, if you make wine and did have the levels of your wine checked, would you stop making wine if you didn’t use RoundUp but the levels of your area made it impossible to allow for low enough levels to satisfy you?
If this were a true worry for me if I were a winemaker, I’d sure as hell be checking levels and disclosing them. Then the question becomes, who will be the first wine grower/maker to abandon his/her vineyard?
Nice post, Anton. Yes, that article is garbage. Saying 100% when only 10 wines were tested is misleading. Then there’s this gem:
The wine brands tested included Gallo, Beringer, Mondavi, Barefoot and Sutter Home.
So essentially, stay away from all wines made from California vineyards if not organic.
That’s illogical.
I’m sure this chemical is everywhere food is grown at this point. Maybe we should all give up eating produce, organic or otherwise. This reminds me of the arsenic scare.
I like a little bit of a Roundup finish in my Mesnil just like I enjoy a touch of Dolphin in my canned tuna. Adds complexity, but like brett, you just don’t want too much.
That being said Glyphosate can do some nasty things in the body including a pretty strong association with lymphoma. So. my preference would be not to see this in anything. 
An association between glyphosate and lymphoma, even in pesticide applicators who have much higher exposures than consumers, is not widely supported in the literature. The following has been criticized for methodology in dealing with non-responders that might underestimate risk, but the risk of lymphoma is not likely to be significantly different from non-exposed individuals, even in the most exposed of this high-exposure population. They did find a non-statistically significant trend towards an association with acute myeloid leukemia in the highest-exposure quartile.
J Natl Cancer Inst. 2018 May 1;110(5):509-516. doi: 10.1093/jnci/djx233.
Glyphosate Use and Cancer Incidence in the Agricultural Health Study.
Andreotti G1, Koutros S1, Hofmann JN1, Sandler DP2, Lubin JH3, Lynch CF4,5, Lerro CC1, De Roos AJ6, Parks CG2, Alavanja MC7, Silverman DT1, Beane Freeman LE1.
BACKGROUND:
Glyphosate is the most commonly used herbicide worldwide, with both residential and agricultural uses. In 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate as “probably carcinogenic to humans,” noting strong mechanistic evidence and positive associations for non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) in some epidemiologic studies. A previous evaluation in the Agricultural Health Study (AHS) with follow-up through 2001 found no statistically significant associations with glyphosate use and cancer at any site.
METHODS:
The AHS is a prospective cohort of licensed pesticide applicators from North Carolina and Iowa. Here, we updated the previous evaluation of glyphosate with cancer incidence from registry linkages through 2012 (North Carolina)/2013 (Iowa). Lifetime days and intensity-weighted lifetime days of glyphosate use were based on self-reported information from enrollment (1993-1997) and follow-up questionnaires (1999-2005). We estimated incidence rate ratios (RRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) using Poisson regression, controlling for potential confounders, including use of other pesticides. All statistical tests were two-sided.
RESULTS:
Among 54 251 applicators, 44 932 (82.8%) used glyphosate, including 5779 incident cancer cases (79.3% of all cases). In unlagged analyses, glyphosate was not statistically significantly associated with cancer at any site. However, among applicators in the highest exposure quartile, there was an increased risk of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) compared with never users (RR = 2.44, 95% CI = 0.94 to 6.32, Ptrend = .11), though this association was not statistically significant. Results for AML were similar with a five-year (RRQuartile 4 = 2.32, 95% CI = 0.98 to 5.51, Ptrend = .07) and 20-year exposure lag (RRTertile 3 = 2.04, 95% CI = 1.05 to 3.97, Ptrend = .04).
CONCLUSIONS:
In this large, prospective cohort study, no association was apparent between glyphosate and any solid tumors or lymphoid malignancies overall, including NHL and its subtypes. There was some evidence of increased risk of AML among the highest exposed group that requires confirmation.
Prof. Kevin Folta summed it up pretty well IMO. It’s always funny to me that despite being a staunch anti-capitalist I’m the one defending Monsanto to capitalists. 
They’re not as evil as anti-GMO propaganda makes them to be. And glyphosate is pretty much the safest thing out there and I for one would not want to go back to worse pesticides. And yes, of course we should be researching even safer ones. For a good round up (heh) on RoundUp my fellow compatriot Iida Ruishalme did a pretty good one: 17 Questions About Glyphosate | Thoughtscapism
However the Lancet would not agree that there is no risk https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2045(15)70134-8/fulltext
Glyphosate is a good example of precautionary principle (mentioned above) citizen science and social media vs systematic and objective science. This is the world we live in today.
Fair enough. However, the review in the Lancet paper did not find sufficient evidence of an association with cancer in humans. Their interpretation is based on the precautionary principle. JimF explains it well. Glyphosate is pretty far down the list of environmental poisons I worry about, at least based on what we currently know.
I think there is an important distinction to make about these applicator/cohort studies. They are inherently studying “exposure” not “ingestion”. If the vector were ingestion from residues on food crops, this would not be captured by simply grouping by applicators and non-applicators. Further, studies that looked at ingestion by lab rats with a 2-3 year lifespan would be quite a bit different, IMO, than daily ingestion by human of small quantities for 50 years — which is the experiment that most of us are “participating” in currently. Beyond the cancer risk, there is also the question of glyphosates antibiotic activity and the potential effect on the human microbiome.
All that said, this doesn’t prove anything, except for to cast a tremendous amount of doubt on conclusions that it’s absolutely the safe. And while it may be cost-effective, we don’t need it to grow grapes. Perhaps we’ll know more in another 20 years, but I don’t consider it for the vines ( in our climate we need the competition from weeds anyway ).