Benchmarking tool: How SWR is bringing clarity to sustainability standards

The benchmarking process really does what it says on the tin.

There are more than 40 wine sustainability standards in the world, which is obviously confusing.

So our role really is to benchmark them, to understand how they vary, how they are similar, to provide clarity and transparency about these different standards around the world.

What does that benchmarking process then actually look like? Because we have something that we've developed called the Global Reference Framework.

Tell us a little bit about that and how we're using that.

Okay, well, the Global Reference Framework is our understanding of what does sustainability in wine actually mean? I mean, it's an expression, but we talk about it a lot, but what does that actually look like? And the GRF does that.

And it's based not just on excellence in wine, but also builds on what's going on in sustainability in other similar sectors.

So consumer goods, other agricultural value chains like cocoa, coffee, tea, palm oil, and really becomes a statement of this is what sustainability in wine needs to encompass.

And we're rather pleased at the moment that it's obviously regarded as being sufficiently definitive that DOIV, the International Wine Organization, is using our global reference framework as the basis for re-evaluating its own understanding of what sustainability in wine looks like.

So that's very good.

The GRF is the core document, but obviously we need to have a gearbox to link that to assessment of each individual standard.

And we do that through a scoring matrix, which starts off with a naught, which is the issue doesn't get mentioned, all the way up to three, which is world-class, you know, one and two in the middle.

And that marks each of the individual issues within the GRF That comes up with an overall score and a score for each of the issue sets.

The other thing that we do, which I think is really important, is we do a narrative evaluation of each of the standards.

And our reason for doing that is that sometimes the bold numeric score doesn't always tell the full picture about what a standard is doing.

how it's going about doing it, also some of the challenges they have in pushing things forward.

We feel our evaluation is an extremely important part of the process.

So we have been working on this for a couple of years and nearing the end.