ECO-PROWINE: an opportunity to become pioneer of wine production sustainability in Europe

Sustainable production is becoming one of the criteria used by consumers in the purchasing process of many goods, including food and beverages: these trends concern in a special manner wine, being its image strongly associated with nature and culture. Wine producers engaged in an improvement of their sustainability levels would like to make it evident to their clients. Nowadays in Europe, wineries can opt for a certification process or can join a private or national program. Nevertheless, the procedures needed to obtain one of these certifications or labels require a significant economic and human resource investment, not affordable by most of the micro, small and medium enterprises that represent the backbone of European wine sector. ECO-PROWINE is an European project (part of the CIP Eco-Innovation program http://ec.europa.eu/environment/eco-innovation/) aimed to provide European wine producers a web tool to assess their sustainability level and to obtain the right of use of a label recognized at EU level. Although not exclusive, the tool has been tailored on small and medium enterprises with direct control of the whole process, from grape growing to wine bottling. The wineries who join the ECO-PROWINE program will be asked to enter a limited number of easy to find and most relevant data (for example annual consumption of fuel, electricity, tap water etc.) in the web assessment tool, based on an Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Life Cycle Costing approach; the system will provide some sustainability indicators for the winery, will show its position with respect of a large EU benchmark and will indicate the most critical phase of the winery production process. When the indicators exceed a minimum level, the winery can ask for right of use of the ECO-PROWINE logo on documentation and labels, granted after a verification of the data provided. Presently, the ECO-PROWINE project is constituting a group of pilot wineries which will have first, free and preferential access to the ECO-PROWINE label. Pilot wineries are asked to first compile a questionnaire entering their own real data, thus creating the initial core of the EU database, and to check the web tool operation by contributing to its fine-tuning. A specific coaching service will be provided to the pilot wineries by the project partners. If you are interested in being the first in Europe to join this sustainability program as part of the pilot winery group, please follow the link on the right: o it represents a no-risk and free opportunity to think over your own sustainability level and strategy, and to consider the potential saving in the purchase of resources o it will greatly contribute to build up a reference EU database on winery sustainability of small and medium producers, which will be a primary tool to foster the growth of the whole sector o it will allow you to get the ECO-PROWINE label with a significant advance on all other EU wineries, providing a powerful argument in your communication strategy toward buyers and consumers Please follow the link on the right More information on www.ecoprowine.eu