The No-Spray Viticulture Revolution

Winegrowers around the globe have made it their goal to grow grapes without sprays. Not only are they succeeding, they are reshaping the way we think about wine.

By: Adam Huss

I knelt in the middle of my rows of Syrah vines in my home vineyard in South Los Angeles, and turned over a bunch of grapes. What I saw made me feel sick. The cluster had been ruined by powdery mildew, as had every other cluster I’d examined that morning. Frustrated, I thought of how much work I had invested in these grapes for the 2023 growing season. In addition to hours of canopy management by hand, I had sprayed four different organic fungicides over a dozen times, on a maximum ten-day schedule since just after bud break. All for naught. At least 90 percent of the crop was lost.

For the last 80 years or so this problem has been solved by most grape farmers by spraying more — and more potent — chemicals than what are organically allowed. We’ve built modern viticulture on sprays, and if we removed those sprays we wouldn’t be able to have wine anymore in most cases.

My viticultural failure in 2023 didn’t lead me to chase the spray dragon and reach for a stronger substance to put into my backpack sprayer, though. Because of the examples of some brave winegrowers I had gotten to know, it made me ask: What if I decided not to spray at all? How would I farm wine grapes without sprays?

As I looked out from my rows of spoiled grapes, I noticed the lemon tree and prickly pear cactus growing directly beside the Syrah vines, and the pomegranate, mango, and macadamia nut trees just a short distance away. They looked vibrant, glistening in moisture from the marine layer that was just burning off, and laden with ripening, abundant, and perfectly healthy fruit. I hadn’t done anything but neglect these fruiting perennials all season, zero sprays or canopy management, yet they thrived with bumper crops.

This observation penetrated through my frustration and became a revelation about my own prejudices. My home vineyard can serve as a microcosm of the broader viticultural industry. Maybe we don’t need new sprays. Maybe we need new ways of thinking about viticulture.

On the East Coast of the US, it is almost a mantra that you cannot grow wine grapes organically. This is mostly true if you define wine grapes as the single species, Vitis vinifera. If wine can only be the fermented juice of this species, then the widely held belief that spraying with chemicals is necessary is right – despite the significant expense for winegrowers and drinkers, degradation of the vineyard ecosystem, and cost to the environment and human health. But some winemakers are showing there’s an alternative.

Matt Niess, the winemaker and owner of North American Press in Sonoma County, California, farms or sources grapes from over nine acres of vines from the Russian River Valley to Nevada, none of which are sprayed, and he’s getting from two to four tons per acre of immaculate, delicious fruit, which is right on par with Napa’s average yield.

At Wijngaard Dassemus in the Netherlands, winemakers Ron Langeveld and Monique van der Goes farm approximately 15 acres of vines with zero sprays. They estimate their production at about a minimum of a liter of wine per vine. “We could produce more grapes, but we’d have to do more,” says Langeveld. “We spend less time and still get a good amount.”

And Mike Appolo, the owner-winemaker of Appolo Vineyards in Derry, New Hampshire, grows one and a half acres of vines that he hasn’t sprayed since he planted them over ten years ago. He grows multiple varieties of grapes, but calculates that he harvests what would equate to six tons per acre of healthy clusters in his best varieties in a good year.

These winegrowers, and others, eschew sprays for many reasons, including: cost savings, better fermentations, human health, soil health, emissions reduction, environmental protection, and because they think it creates wine with a greater reflection of terroir. As compelling as these reasons may be, they’re in an extreme minority in the wine industry. The use of sprays is so common and unquestioned that these vineyards are not only unusual, they are revolutionary.

The Prevalence of Spraying in Viticulture

Ask any grape grower about their spray program and you might be in for a long conversation. To learn viticulture is, in part, to learn what, when, and how to spray. Niess says that most growers don’t believe him when he tells them he doesn’t spray and still gets a healthy crop of grapes. “They don’t know what to say because they’ve never considered it an option,” he says.

The economic cost of spraying is not just in the price of the pesticide and fungicide products. There’s also the labor cost, the time spent training workers and applying the chemicals, diesel fuel, and regular tractor maintenance. These direct costs can total hundreds of dollars per acre, and then there are the indirect costs: soil compaction and degradation, pollution of groundwater, and decrease in biodiversity both above and below ground. And don’t forget the costs of the supply chain: whether it’s organic or conventional, a winegrower’s purchase of fungicide supports the fossil fueled industry behind the production, marketing, distribution, use, and regulation of pesticides.

Then there are the health costs. A new study shows an increase in the risk of acute leukemia in children who live in areas of high viticulture density in France, and poisoning of children by vineyard sprays continues to make the news. Another study discovered a possible link between exposure to vineyard sprays and respiratory issues like asthma and rhinitis. That’s just in and around vineyards. A 2021 study concluded that 44% of farmers globally suffer from unintentional acute pesticide poisoning annually. The European Environment Agency’s (EEA) report on the impact of pesticides on human health found “strong or suspected links have been established between exposure to pesticides and increased risk of several chronic diseases.” Despite continual reassurances of the relative safety of the products, commonly used pesticides continue to be banned as better studies uncover their toxicity, while the US continues to allow the use of many pesticides that have been or are in the process of being banned in China, Brazil, and the EU,

When Mike Appolo got his pesticide applicators license – a requirement for any commercial winegrower who uses any kinds of sprays – it reinforced his decision to farm organically. “Learning all the safety risks was a huge lesson for me about why I didn’t want to spray [conventional fungicides and pesticides],” he says. In two years of holding his license, he only sprayed one grape variety one year with organic materials. So he got rid of that variety to become completely no-spray—and let his license expire.

Some former grape samplers for large California wineries have confided to me that after watching the required safety videos about vineyard sprays, they chose not to taste the grapes, despite the urging of their employers, because they were concerned for their health. One explained why she didn’t return for a second season as a grape sampler by saying, “I mean, I want to have kids someday!”

Grapes don’t get washed before they’re made into wine. But even if they were, systemic fungicides and pesticides are the most efficacious of conventional sprays. These sprays can penetrate and move around inside of plant tissues. That means they can’t be washed off.

The grapes that those informed grape samplers didn’t want to put into their mouths become the wine that uninformed consumers drink. “Most consumers have never considered that every wine they ever drank was most likely [from grapes] sprayed with something,” says Niess.

Rebuilding Resilience in the Vineyard

The majority of winegrowers consider sprays to be necessary because we’ve built our wine industry on a select few European grapes that are seen as superior to grapes from anywhere else in the world—and all the problematic thinking that embodies. Starting in the 1930s, France and later the entire EU made hybrids and grapes native to other parts of the world illegal, despite, and even perhaps because of their success. This set the tone of prejudice for the foundation of our current wine industry. By cloning the same few varieties of grapes for generations, we’ve had to substitute natural resilience with bottled solutions.

“This entire system is based upon unquestioned assumptions about what varieties of grapes we have to grow for wine,” says Nicholas Kimberly, a winegrower in New Hampshire who has experimented with eliminating sprays in one of the vineyards he tends under his label Nok Vino.

The important reality that the no-spray winegrowers show us is that a mindset shift can free you from many of the burdens of a dysfunctional approach to viticulture. Wine doesn’t have to be a continual reproduction of a handful of fashionable grapes. It can be a process of adaptation, achieved by ongoing breeding and selection, that embraces the one constant of life: change. 

Climate change has caused intense and extremely variable weather, as well as new pests and expanded territory for old pests, revealing the shortcomings of Vitis vinifera. This is a main reason the EU has relaxed its laws against hybrid grapes, and why you can now find hybrids in Champagne and Bordeaux blends.

One of the reasons for my grape crop failure last year was that Los Angeles experienced one of its wettest ever growing seasons. Not only does the climate demand a new approach, but data shows that younger consumers care less about—and buy fewer—Vitis vinifera wines. The wine industry could face a sea change in the fundamental understanding of what wine is and could be.

“If you eliminate sprays, it causes you to think more ecologically about what fruit is suited to your climate,” says Dan Durica, the founder of Hardcore Sustainable YouTube channel, who farms an acre of no-spray vineyards at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage in Missouri, by continually trying new varieties and only keeping the ones that do well.

This approach fits with the pursuit of wines of place. “A lot of farming is focused on getting more—extracting the maximum amount of any crop—whereas our farming is focused on getting the best,” says Appolo. “The best quality, and the best taste of a place, of terroir, by not using outside inputs.” Of course, at six tons per acre in a good year, he can also get above-average production.

The commitment to making wine without sprays may also lead us to explore other fruit besides grapes. It currently may seem like an insane proposition to re-define wine to include any fermented fruit beverages, but there is no universal law saying that grapes are the best and only way to express the soul of a land and its culture. Producers like Austin Glasscock of Wild Texas Wines show us what’s possible when we seek to truly express terroir. He makes wines only with unfarmed (or wild) foraged native fruit. This moves his wine way past “no spray.” His location is Sonora, Texas, so there are no grapes used in his wines because no grapes grow on his land.

Is a No-Spray Wine Industry Possible?

Ecological viticulture works practically and economically as well. Zac Brown, the winegrower and proprietor of Alderlea Vineyards, grows over three acres of vines on Vancouver Island in British Columbia that he only sprays once per year with an organic oil, as a precaution rather than a necessity. He gets an average of five to six tons per acre. These acres grow next to another five acres of grapes that he must spray at least six times every growing season. The difference is simply in the genetics. His resilient vines also produce 40 to 90 percent more grapes, withstand early and late frosts, and can go longer without water stress during times of drought.

To test this, Brown turned off the irrigation and evaluated the vines using pressure bomb tests. “We were able to see that the hybrids could handle an extra 10 to 12 days between irrigation intervals than the vinifera could when it was showing the same sort of pressure bomb stress indicators,” says Brown. The main reason he sprays the hybrids at all is to protect his five acres of non-resilient vines, which grow directly beside them. “I absolutely believe that you could get away without spraying these particular hybrids,” Brown says. “I’m doing it once to protect everything else around it.”

No-spray vineyards are able to be successful by growing resistant modern grape varieties with diverse parentages. There are delicious grapes that have genetic resistance to nearly every plague that affects vinifera from Pierce’s Disease to powdery mildew, and grape breeders continue to develop more and better ones every year. 

Brown’s vineyard is a great example of how the wine industry could transition to a more resilient model of viticulture. As we move away from the cringey yet strangely persistent idea of European genetic supremacy in wine, and begin to re-indigenize our local wine cultures, we will need to transition the market for these wines as well. As of 2021, over 40 percent  of the global wine production comes from only ten grapes, all Vitis Vinifera, led by Cabernet Sauvignon.

Introducing Consumers to New Grapes

Ripping out all of your Cab Sauv and planting Marquette, however, might set you up for failure until more consumers become comfortable with great wines made from unfamiliar grapes. But replanting with 25 to 40 percent resistant grapes that you don’t have to spray could immediately save you money and provide a risk management strategy in the face of climate change, while allowing you to blend or present these wines side-by-side with their more familiar counterparts.

“Our ‘Matrix’ is a blend of Cabernet Foch, Cabernet Libre, and Merlot. It has become so popular that we took it off our tasting menu. People know it’s great. They’ve started asking for it in local stores,” says Brown.

In Spain, just outside of Barcelona, Mireia Pujol-Busquets is breeding resistant varieties of Catalonian grapes[17] [18] . Her goal is to transition the entirety of her family’s estate, Alta Alella, to grapes that preserve the traditions of her culture and withstand the extremes of climate change, which they have already begun to experience, without needing to be sprayed. “The objective at the end is that I don’t want to have to treat the plants. I want adapted plants. Healthy plants,” she says. Her vision was inspired by working on a farm in Switzerland  that grew PIWI grapes without sprays.

E. & J. Gallo also has its own grape breeding department. Given the acreage they control, if they bred grape varieties that didn’t need to be sprayed the cost savings could total in the millions of dollars annually. A mere $100 per acre saved in just their 23,000 acres of California vineyards wouldn’t hurt, and this may be on the low end of the potential savings.

No spray viticulture is much more difficult in wetter climates, and depending on the specific varieties of grapes that you grow. Some say that the challenges in these areas will eventually catch up to the no-spray growers there and make it a losing proposition commercially. Yet from Missouri to New Hampshire to Holland, these pioneers seem to be making it work and have made it through the first decade.

For no-spray growers in Mediterranean climates, on the other hand, the main challenges may be educating consumers about the benefits of this kind of viticulture and introducing them to new grapes and ways of thinking about wine. We may need to learn how to communicate a vision of wine as an adaptive process rather than as museum exhibit renderings of European wine cultures.

These no-spray growers represent the cutting edge of what could be the future of wine. As the 100-year experiment with spray viticulture and all of the biases and short-sighted perspectives from which it resulted limps toward its nauseating conclusion, a return to the fundamentals of how we farmed for millennia, in emulation of and cooperation with nature, just seems smart.[23]  You can only beat nature temporarily. For a truly sustainable wine industry we’ll need to re-join her.

As much as I love Syrah, I’ve ripped out my Syrah vines, and I’ve ordered ten varieties of modern (hybrid) grapes with which I’ll replant this spring. As heartbreaking as it was to cut down those vines, I’m excited that I’ll likely never have to spray these new grapes. This psychological shift in my thinking could be as important as the environmental benefits, and means more than saving time, energy, and money. I’m beginning think of growing grapes without a sense of obligation or fear driving me to spend time caring for them. They aren’t things I have to baby-sit, they are partners who bring me joy and who give me as much as, if not more, than I give them. I feel a sense of relief, a sense of freedom. I can’t wait to not spray this year.