A “sharp increase” in trifluoroacetic acid (TFA) in European wines underscores how thoroughly this little-known “forever chemical” – part of a family of persistent pollutants – has infected food, water and soil over time.
According to the Guardian, researchers from Pesticide Action Network Europe initially tested 10 Austrian cellar wines from as early as 1974, as well as vintages from between 2021 and 2024 purchased in Austrian supermarkets, to measure how policy changes they suspect led to widespread use of precursor chemicals to TFA impacted wine.
Confronted with unexpectedly high levels of TFA contamination, they reached out to partners across Europe to submit samples from their own countries.
The full analysis included 49 bottles of commercial wine from 10 countries, with wines produced before 1988 showing no trace of TFA, while those bottled after 2010 showed a “sharp rise” in contamination, averaging 121 micrograms per litre in the most recent wines compared to concentrations of 13 to 21 micrograms per litre in wine bottled between 1988 and 2010. Organic varieties generally exhibited lower levels than their conventional counterparts.
“The wines that contained the highest concentration of TFA, on average, were also the wines we found with the highest amount of pesticide residue,” Salomé Roynel from Pesticide Action Network Europe told the Guardian. The organisation has called on the European Commission and EU member states to ban per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in pesticides.
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PFAS have become incredibly common in modern life, and are among the roughly 7 million forever chemicals appearing in everything from dental floss to non-stick cookware to pesticides. Such chemicals are found in water, air, fish and soil at locations around the world. Despite their longevity in the environment and studies showing some have harmful effects on people, historically, authorities have not shown much interest in regulating PFAS.
Researchers are far more concerned, some even positing that the persistent nature and growing concentrations of TFA imply it meets the criteria for a “planetary boundary threat for novel entities,” meaning it could have potentially irreversible disruptive impacts on vital Earth systems.
Hans Peter Arp, lead author of that study and a researcher at Norwegian University of Science and Technology, called the results of the wine study “shocking” in comments to the Guardian. “They also provide further evidence that PFAS pesticides can be a major source of TFA in agricultural areas, alongside other sources such as refrigerants and pharmaceuticals.”
Fluorinated refrigerants known as F-gases, increasingly used after 1988 as an alternative to ozone-depleting substances like chlorofluorocarbons, are thought to be one of the main sources of TFA in the environment, alongside PFAS pesticides. Farmland, one 2024 study revealed, has shown a “significant increase” in TFA groundwater concentrations compared with other land uses.
“Everywhere you look it’s increasing. There’s no study where the concentration of TFA hasn’t increased,” David Behringer, an environmental consultant who has studied TFA in rain for the German government, told the Guardian last year. “If you’re drinking water, you’re drinking a lot of TFA, wherever you are in the world.” With removal of this forever chemical being both difficult and prohibitively expensive, he explains, “the logical course is to stop the input.”
