From environmental to sustainability programs: A review of sustainability initiatives in the Italian wine sector

Abstract

The Italian wine industry is strongly committed to sustainability: the stakeholders' interest for the topic is constantly growing and a wide number of sustainability programs have been launched in recent years, by both private businesses and consortiums. The launch of these initiatives has signaled the commitment of farmers and wine producers to the implementation of sustainability principles in viticulture and wine production, which is a positive signal. Unfortunately, however, the varied design of the sustainability initiatives and the differences in the objectives, methodologies, and proposed tools risks to create confusion, and undermine the positive aspects of these initiatives. In order to bring some clarity to this topic, we herein present a comparison of the most important sustainability programs in the Italian wine sector, with the overall objective of highlighting the opportunity to create synergies between the initiatives and define a common sustainability strategy for the Italian wine sector. © 2014 by the authors.