How do sustainable practices affect the value chain of small and medium-sized wineries?

In recent years, socioeconomic challenges have become a fundamental aspect of any company's aims, both in Italy and worldwide. While it used to be thought that profit was the sole determinant of the value of a business, today, the size of a company is undoubtedly determined by several criteria, all equally important. Those who proclaim CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) always go further. The quality and sustainability of agri-food supply chains aim to contribute to the definition of development trajectories of agricultural and forestry systems that combine the three pillars of sustainable development: (1) economic (development of competitive sectors); (2) social (ensuring the coexistence of different types of subjects, companies, and territories); and (3) environmental. Sustainability is defined as a three-pillar equilibrium based on social, economic, and environmental sustainability requirements. (UN, 2015). In this perspective, the challenging task is finding the equilibrium between forces and dynamics that often produce a trade-off. (01) There are so many meanings for sustainability that it casts a cloud of ambiguity around it. Sustainability may be defined as a notion based on several concepts, including economic, ecological, intragenerational, and intergenerational fairness principles. The concepts of economic sustainability involve maximizing profit and increasing efficiency. Ecological sustainability covers effective usage of natural resources and minimalizes impacts of production supply chain actors of production. Intragenerational and intergenerational fairness concepts are more about social welfare and generation integration of welfare. My thesis aims to analyze all possible and implemented sustainable practices over the world and in Italy and conceptualize these results on SMEs in the Italian wine industry. To characterize wine SMEs in Italy, they may need to be divided into family and non-family businesses. As the Italian wine industry is largely composed of small and medium-sized businesses, they also make up a great portion of total wine production. The motive of choosing this subject is to bring attention to running SMEs with sustainable implementations because the difference between SMEs and normal businesses is the ability to achieve enough sources in order to gain a competitive advantage.