Sustainable Wine Roundtable reveals latest findings

By Jaq Bayles

Published: 13 August, 2025

As part of its Global Reference Framework (GRF) for wine sustainability certification schemes, the Sustainable Wine Roundtable (SWR) has issued a second round of benchmarking.

The SWR developed the framework to compare the more than 40 sustainability certification schemes in the global wine industry, “cut through complexity and align around meaningful, measurable progress”.

Following this latest evaluation of eight certification schemes, including the globally operating EU Organic (Europe/Global) and Demeter (Global), the SWR has concluded that work needs to be done to support smaller producers, and that there are challenges around bought-in grapes.

Read more: Dermot Sugrue – ‘Looking Back, Forging Ahead’

It points out that the reality for smaller producers “is that any certification comes with a financial cost and a heavy administrative load; therefore the challenge for standards bodies is how these producers can be brought into the fold”.

SWR operations manager Delaney Sheridan added: “In a fragmented industry like wine, because small producers make up quite a large part of the supply chain, it's a really critical issue to address. If sustainability is going to work at scale within the industry, smaller players also really need to be a part of it.”

SWR said it had been impressed with the creative solutions some standards bodies have found to enable this, including access to grants, sponsorship support or simplified requirements around paperwork.

When it comes to bought in grapes, SWR research director Peter Stanbury said: “The challenge arises when a winemaker buys in grapes which have not been produced in accordance with a standard. Some standards bodies are explicit about the maximum proportion of grapes in a wine which can come from non-certified sources, and indeed some require all grapes used to be from certified growers. Others, however, provide less detail about the level of bought grapes that can be used.

“This is clearly an important issue and cuts to the heart of how credible a standard label is in demonstrating good sustainability performance.” The GFR will be revised to include a requirement on this topic in future.

This latest round of evaluation follows last year’s pilot study and, as well as the already mentioned bodies, looked at: FairChoice (Germany); Wines of Alentejo Sustainability Programme (WASP) (Alentejo, Portugal); Terra Vitis (France); COVIAR – Argentinian Wine Sustainability Self-Assessment Guide (GAESVA) (Argentina); Sustainability Code of the Chilean Wine Industry – Vinos de Chile (Chile); and Napa Green (Napa, California);

Stanbury said of the work of the SWR: “It became apparent that having a single global standard for wine sustainability wouldn't work, and therefore there was a need for a process that would provide comparability between the more than 40 sustainability standards in wine that exist. How are they the same, how are they different?

“The aim of this whole process is not just to say ‘one pile of standards provides a credible journey to sustainability, and others may not’. It's also about how, over time, do we improve all of these standards bodies’ work, and how we make them better globally.”

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