The Business of Sustainable Wine: How to Build Brand Equity in a 21st Century Wine Industry

Modern agriculture is the largest single contributor to global greenhouse gas production, deforestation and water consumption. Biodiversity, climate change, energy, soil degradation and water scarcity are critical issues and consumers are increasingly and justifiably concerned about where their food and beverages come from and whether they are produced in a responsible way, often without an understanding of how to determine the provenance of the products they consume. Wine is no exception, and as a whole it has a lot more work to do. In The World of Sustainable Wine, internationally recognized export in environmental sustainability, Sandra Taylor, offers a new view of how the industry can be an important actor in sustainable agriculture, getting ahead of coming demands for a more responsible approach to our common future, and provides a unique insight for the consumer on what to look for on the supermarket shelves to verify what counts as sustainable and what doesn’t. The World of Sustainable Wine describes and analyzes trends in sustainability in wine regions around the world. It will help all of us gain important insight into the complicated world of agricultural sustainability, what it is for a wine to be a sustainable food product and how best to communicate these sustainable attributes to wine consumers. Drawing on case studies from a multitude of commodity industries, Taylor gives producers tools and frameworks for how to go about integrating sustainability into their winegrowing and marketing, and retailers’ procurement managers will learn how to assess sustainable attributes of wines on offer. Today there is a strong and growing consumer contingent that prefers to purchase organically grown and unprocessed food, while increasingly strident social activists expect products to be ethically, responsibly and sustainably produced. Like fair trade cocoa and shade grown coffee, wine must, sooner or later, meet these powerful demands.