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Sustainable Wine Roundtable unveils pilot harmonisation scheme

Mindful of the proliferation of accreditation bodies and external oversight, the organisation sought to identify “how effective the different standards were in a variety of areas related to environment, labour, governance and auditing”.

According to the SWR: “The benchmarking process is based on SWR’s Global Reference Framework, the first global statement of what sustainability in wine encompasses. It is a credible, rigorously researched matrix, drawing on expertise from the wine sector and from outside it; the SWR team boasts 85 years' experience in sustainability in a wide range of sectors which they were able to bring to the framework’s creation.”

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Certification programs in California, South Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Italy and Germany were analysed and cross-referenced by the SWR, including Sustainable Winegrowing New Zealand, Sustainable Winegrowing Australia, Equalitas (based in Italy) and Fair’N Green (based in Germany).

Some of the key criteria for study included the viability of audits for smaller wineries; the level of support offered by certification bodies; the importance of region-specific standards and protecting labour rights.

Dr Peter Stanbury, Research Director for the SWR, commented: “First of all, we want to thank the seven groups who offered themselves up for this project. It has been an invaluable first exercise to take us eventually to a global overview of what should be included in any sustainability standard in wine.

“In undertaking this process, we needed to reconcile two potentially contradictory truths: standards need to be local – we talk of terroir with wine, the same is true of standards; but there is an urgent need for comparability – how standards are the same, how they are different. The idea of the exercise is to identify and share best practice so that retailers, wine producers, supply chain providers and in fact any interested parties can know what constitutes good practice and reliable metrics in the world of wine production.”

The issue of multiple accreditation schemes has also been raised by signatories of the Harpers Sustainability Charter.

“There is an increasing number of certifications in the wine industry, some of them just for specific wine regions, which can make things confusing for customers,” said Marta Juega Rivera, oenology & sustainability manager, Alliance Wine.

“Attaining a certification should be an objective of a sustainability strategy and not the main purpose. In our case, we see B-Corp not as a certification, but a movement to follow and a way to transform organisations into agents of change, which is directly aligned with our purpose as a company.”

Andrea Cardenas, head of sustainability at Viña Seña, added: “There should be a call to promote the unification of criteria and standards of certifications that are similar under the same process, simplifying this exercise. This could also simplify the understanding and comparison of sustainable practices between different companies and products.”

• Sustainable Wine Roundtable
• SWR
• Global Reference Framework
• independent global platform
• advancing sustainability