BRUSSELS — Europe’s favorite bottle of red or white may come with an unwanted ingredient: toxic chemicals that don’t break down naturally.
A new investigation has found widespread contamination in European wines with trifluoroacetic acid (TFA) — a persistent byproduct of PFAS, the group of industrial chemicals widely known as “forever chemicals.” None of the wines harvested in the past few years across 10 EU countries came back clean. In some bottles, levels were found to be 100 times higher than what’s typically measured in drinking water.
The study, published Wednesday by the Pesticide Action Network (PAN) Europe, adds fresh urgency to calls for a rapid phase-out of pesticides containing PFAS, a family of human-made chemicals designed to withstand heat, water and oil, and to resist breaking down in the environment.
Wine production is among the heaviest users of pesticides in European agriculture, particularly fungicides, making vineyards a likely hotspot for chemical accumulation. Grapes are especially vulnerable to fungal diseases, requiring frequent spraying throughout the growing season, including with some products that contain PFAS compounds.
