Despite sustainable wine tourism being one of the hottest topics of the moment, there is still a considerable knowledge gap. If managed with due care and consideration of the region’s carrying capacity, wine tourism can be an essential regional development tool for improving business performance, environmental awareness, and community values. On the other hand, it can be responsible for negative environmental impacts, creating local resentment. This paper explored and contextualized wine tourism and sustainable winegrowing practices in the Portuguese Douro wine region. The aim was to offer practical recommendations and directives for such a unique landscape. From the adoption of regenerative agriculture and natural-based solutions at the field level to engaging in sustainability wine programs or certification schemes integrating both sectors, it is indispensable to develop frameworks to assess sustainability performance, tourism development, and the impact on the local population. Nevertheless, to accomplish business success and territorial development, a win–win relationship between all stakeholders is foremost needed. The Douro region must therefore start by investing in stronger collaboration networks between local actors through careful and integrated planning so that the needs of all interested parties, including its residents, are considered and incorporated in future sustainable tourism initiatives.

No question remains regarding our need to change toward sustainable agriculture. When ranking the industries that have more prevalent environmental impacts, agriculture holds a considerable share of responsibility. However, as sustainability is an ambiguous concept surrounded by controversy and debate, rather than attempt to describe its meaning through a single universal definition, we instead stressed the need to delineate a set of fundamental principles. With the goal of putting the sustainable-agriculture concept into practice, an inductive qualitative content analysis was employed based on multivariate methods on hundreds of different definitions, theories, notions and sustainability indicators gathered through a deep-structured literature review. Through this novel approach, we were able to identify four fundamental principles for sustainable agriculture (integrated management, dynamic balance, regenerative design, and social development), and concluded that in order to shift our current agricultural systems into more efficient and sustainable ones, we need to start making better use of natural and human resources. This work provides guidelines for reference that can be used by anyone whenever they make a decision regarding sustainable agriculture or apply a methodology to assess a particular behavior, process or situation.

In order to bridge the knowledge-gap between sustainability awareness and the old world winegrowing culture, this research explores and analyses perceptions of key individuals in Portuguese wine industry regarding sustainability issues, uncovering intercultural trends, expectations and tensions. A grounded theory approach was used on collected nationwide data from semi-structured interviews with leading wine specialists. After conducting an inductive qualitative-content analysis using IRAMUTEQ software, results displayed key domains of concern rooted into three lexical macro ramifications analogous to the environmental-social-governance factors. The sector’s tendency to approach sustainability based on different strategies of action was also exposed. These are the fuse of two main strategic profiles: impact assessment versus value creation; with external exposure versus inward orientation approach. Findings may be used as a reference to wine managers and policy-makers pursuing sustainability goals. The development of a sustainability framework with guidelines is also recommended for standardized accounting and valuation principles in line with the Portuguese context.

Wine-grape growing is extremely vulnerable to climate change impacts for deeply relying on weather conditions. Considering the notable shortage of multidimensional instruments designed specifically to assess sustainability of winegrowing systems, a three-tier hierarchical framework has been developed. This work presents an initial testing of the theoretical framework´s assessment approach, and its capacity to take the context in which the evaluation is taking place into account. For such, after the presentation of general assumptions of the framework, figurative cases of the Portuguese wine industry were evaluated regarding one of the 27 themes of the assessment tool. The theme here tested and presented (theme water use and wastewater) is composed by three sub-themes, with three indicators each. At the end, nine indicators covering from the water footprint, to the wastewater management or local water availability were measured and evaluated. Information gathered and used for this work was based on literature and official sources involved in collecting and elaborating water related data. Results of this initial validation were promising and showed that structured and hierarchical design approaches may be a functional way to holistically assess the sustainability performance of complex production sectors such as the wine industry.