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

Paperback, 7 x 10, 240pp, B&W illustrations

Sandra Taylor

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 Business 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 Business 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.

Sandra Taylor is an internationally recognized expert on environmental sustainability, social responsibility, agricultural supply chains and public relations. As a corporate executive for 22 years, including Starbucks Coffee Company, she designed innovative codes of conduct for sustainable procurement of coffee, cocoa and tea. A Wine MBA graduate of the Ecole Supérieure de Commerce de Bordeaux-Ecole de Management / Bordeaux Business School in France, and a recipient of a Juris Doctorate (JD) from Boston University School of Law, she has written articles on strategies for supply chain management, marketing sustainability and motivations for environmental and social responsibility in wine value chains.  She is a wine educator and founder of Fine Wine Divas, a learning experience for women on the origins of wine grapes, geography, terroir and food pairing. She currently resides in Washington, DC.