Social implication of Circular Economy in the wine supply chain: a literature review

Wine production is a relevant activity in many countries worldwide: in Italy, the wine industry generated 13.8 billion of euros, representing the 10% of the national agri-food sector turnover. Viticulture and wine making are ancient activities, which represent an important tradition in many cultures and have a fundamental bond with the territory. Indeed, vineyards are deeply affected by the environmental conditions and the characteristics of the territory in which they are located. On the other hand, scholars and policy makers have stressed their concern about the considerable environmental impacts caused by the wine supply chain, such as water consumption, waste generation, and chemical use. In parallel, the emerging debate on Circular Economy (CE) developed proposals for strategies to mitigate these impacts and make the wine industry more sustainable and profitable at the same time. In this regard, among the three pillars of sustainability, the social one has been basically underexplored. Despite this, a more holistic view is needed to assess whether circular business models are suitable to reach new levels of social sustainability. The present study aims to carry out a bibliometric analysis to explore the literature debate on social sustainability of CE in the wine industry by analysing the records’ publication year, authors’ affiliations, scientific journal, subject area, and conducting a network analysis of authors’ keywords co-occurrence. The results provide a picture of the interest to date for this emerging but still overlooked topic, capturing the relationships standing among the concepts involved, and offer a baseline for further analysis.