"About 65% of the world’s wine production is managed by European winegrowers. Wine production in Europe is traditionally performed by small and medium sized, family owned companies and co-operatives. Solid and liquid residues are not treated in an appropriate way what has a serious impact on the environment. Wine production is known to produce high amounts of wastewater with sometimes extremely high organic loads (COD 2.500-67.000 mg/L). This leads to shock loads to municipal wastewater treatment plants or to serious impacts on rivers and lakes, in case the vineyard is not connected to a sever system at all. In addition, solid residues are also not handled properly, being in many cases deposited in vineyards as compost or fertilizer, whose degradation leads to odour formation and ground water contamination and infectious diseases. These treatment systems have been proven to be ineffective in complying with the legislative environmental requirements, disposal regulations, and safety restrictions for solid re-use. Moreover, the tremendous potential of the remaining high-value, biologically active substances and valorisation activities are generally unused or unknown. In addition, environmental legislations and quality regulations become stricter and force vineyards to take measures to improve the environmental situation in wine production. The associations are aware of this situation and want to initiate necessary R&D activities to offer technical assistance to their member SMEs. To cope with this challenge the wine producers need technnical support. Therefore SUSTAVINO intends to help the European wine producers, to meet environmental regulations by providing an Environmental Quality Strategy for Sustainable Wine production (EQSW), which will encompass integrated approaches for treating and valorising wastes in a cost-effective and ecological way, and carrying out comprehensive training and capacity building to the SMEs and SME-AGs."