Reflecting back on the last three years, what are some of the biggest learnings for us? I'm thinking, especially when it comes to driving change at scale throughout the supply chain, what have we learned about what does work and what doesn't work?

Well, I should say that because actually one of the wide where do we go next is going to be a how to guide.

Because although we can only say lightweight your bottles, that just means going and buying lighter ones.

Actually, There is a lot of complexity.

You've got to, as a producer, you have to get your brand team on board.

It might be you need to somehow, in some way, recalibrate your bottling line.

It might be that you've got to work out slightly differently how those bottles pack in practice.

So do you want to share just a little bit about that?

Do these corporations understand there's a moral dimension these days to doing business?

Yeah, moral is a difficult word in that it employs a judgment.

And it implies, you know, you and I, I would suggest, will share very much the same broadly moral outlook as this is the right thing to do, this is the wrong thing to do.

That's not the case with everyone, that other people might have what they consider to be completely moral outlook, but it's different from ours, which again comes back to my point about understanding why people do what they do and what motivates them.

You know, even if you talk about terrorist organizations, saying they're mad is not helpful.

You have to understand what they're doing.

So I'm not, obviously... terrorist organizations and large corporations entirely different things.

I just wonder how concerned should the wine industry be and consumers be about labour standards?

How are companies shaping their packaging strategy and how do they really know what to prioritize?

Well, I think to answer that question is exactly why we've been doing the work.

there's a lot of things to think through when it comes to packaging.

And I guess our starting point was to say, well, let's get together a solid evidence base to say what actually the facts are and what the various issues are that need to be considered when making a decision around sustainable packaging.

The start point was when we saw someone had brought out a new plastic bottle, PET bottle, and we say this was more sustainable because it had a lower carbon footprint.

Now, of course, that's true.

The plastic bottle has a lower carbon footprint than a glass bottle does.

How are all these responses going to feed into our work? What's coming next? I

And could you share what some of those are?

I think obviously one tends to see standards as being the badge you get at the end of it.

You go through a process of doing work on sustainability, a certification process, and you get a label you can stick on your website or on the bottles of wine.

Whereas actually, obviously, that's important.

But also, equally, perhaps even more important, is the standard of the management process, guidance, as well as an end goal.

Sustainability, as you all know, can seem a very complicated subject.

And there are lots of issues involved, viticulture, energy, water, labour standards, packaging, transport, all of those sort of things.

Isn't that right?

So tell us about those.

At the end of the day, still wine is still wine.

It doesn't matter whether it's a Bordeaux or an Australian wine or from California or wherever, it's got the same properties.

The challenge with sparkling wine is it's produced in a number of different ways.

There's anything up to seven or eight different ways in which sparkling wines are made, and all of those end up with different bar pressures, and therefore, the bottle needs to perform differently.

Because obviously, the key thing with sparkling wine is, you know, if you drop a bottle of still wine, it just makes a bit of a mess on the carpet, whereas if you drop a bottle of sparkling wine, you've potentially got an explosion.

And then therefore, the safety considerations were considerable because we don't want to be in a situation where we are making recommendations which are going to be dangerous.

So having gone through that process already with the Still Bottle Weight Accord, what were some of the learnings just in that whole stakeholder engagement process that we've applied to the Sparkling Bottle Weight Accord? What came up?

Peter Delaney, we'd love to hear from you as well.

Well, first of all, Toby's probably neglected the most seminal moment of the formation of SWR, which is a rather splendid lunch that he and I had in 2022 in Lisbon, where we hatched out a lot of the areas of activity that subsequently became our action areas.

And I think I'd pick out two particular areas.

One is the work we've done on benchmarking.

I mean, the issue is what actually do we mean by sustainability in wine? You know, it's a lovely expression, but what does that actually mean in practice? And so the development of the global reference framework, which builds on all the work that Toby and I have done in other sectors about what does sustainability entail and how does that apply to wine? draws on what's going on in wine sustainability standards, but also what goes on in coffee, tea, consumer goods.

Pulling that together as a statement of this is what sustainability looks like, obviously that evolves over time.

But then using that as a basis for benchmarking all of the various wine sustainability standards in the world.

Tell us about the vineyard and labor standards work.