Published by the U.S. Wine Trade Alliance on Saturday:

On April 2nd, President Trump will make an announcement regarding reciprocal tariffs. Previously, the thinking in Washington had been that this date would see a set of instructions or other actions initiated, as the time necessary to determine truly reciprocal tariffs (including non-tariff trade barriers) would be many months.

Now, it seems the administration may not be looking to enact truly reciprocal tariffs between products or sectors, which would take time to determine, but will instead use a single rate for each country or trading block. There has been reporting that Commerce Secretary Lutnick indicated to the EU that reciprocal tariffs somewhere between 10% and 25% could now be imposed as soon as April 2.

We have spent the last several days in Washington D.C., asking members of Congress, and staff at USTR and Commerce, to keep tariffs off wine. Likewise, we have stated clearly how catastrophic April 2 would be for American businesses if they imposed tariffs without a notice period or goods-on-the-water exception. While we have no guarantee, we are hopeful any tariffs imposed would allow for businesses to receive the goods that were already in transit without a damaging surprise tariff.

Uncertainty is a frustrating yet defining element of this process, and we understand how truly damaging this is to your businesses. We know that many of you have halted all shipments of wine from the EU, as we are still in purgatory, waiting for the forthcoming announcements from the EU and the U.S. regarding steel tariffs and any potential retaliations that could impact our industry. American businesses are suffering right now, and the administration will need to work hard to right the ship. Policies that prevent American businesses from generating the revenue they need to survive are incredibly harmful.

We will keep you updated with details as we have them. The next few weeks will be incredibly stressful for our industry, but we are all in this together.

After I posted my recent chat with D.C.-based wine and spirits industry lobbyist Erlinda Doherty about the ongoing tariff war, I received scores of messages asking us to do more vlog posts.

As she recounts in the video below, she has been interacting this week with congress members and sharing the pain caused by the uncertainty of the looming import/export taxes.

She also confirmed that according to the word on the street, the wine tariffs won’t be as high as expected and they will probably be based on a country-by-country basis.

She and I are also planning on covering urgent topics in future posts: new organic labeling regulations, new dietary labeling regulations, and the neo-prohibition movement.

I know she shares my desire to help people in the wine industry navigate these challenging seas. I can’t thank her enough for making time for it. Stay tuned! Stay strong!

According to my source in D.C., the E.U. and U.S. trade negotiators agreed earlier this week that 20 percent reciprocal tariffs will be enacted in April.

That’s the word on the street, although I haven’t been able to confirm this figure. But it would seem to align with what Trump’s press secretary told reporters earlier today (following Trump’s middle-of-the-night tweet announcing automobile tariffs): the E.U. reciprocal tariffs, she said, will “be more conservative than many people are expecting.”

I have been talking to importers of Italian wine, large and small, all week. Some are working as fast as they can to get wine to the U.S. Others have cancelled all orders until there is more clarity. At least one major Italian importer is reassuring clients said that there will be no disruption while another top player announced that all orders are on hold until the tariff storm passes.

The lucky ones are those who front-loaded their inventory at the beginning of the year.

“America is a great country. I love Americans,” said Pietro Oddero (below, left), scion of the legacy Barolo grower Oddero. We met at a tasting organized by his importer in Houston, Ian McCaffery (below right), owner of the Austin-based Rootstock. Pietro shared the sign he created above.

He also reminded me that his family’s winery survived both 20th-century world wars. “We’ll get through this,” he told me cautiously but confidently.

In a rare interview with a major mainstream media outlet this week, Angelo Gaja shares a ray of light that he sees in the fog of tariff war.

(The interview came to my attention via a post by the excellent Italian wine-focused journalist Filippo Larganà and his blog Sapori del Piemonte.)

He reminds his interlocutor, the high-profile editor and journalist Salvatore Merlo, that Italy was spared from tariffs in the first Trump administration while other European nations like France were targeted.

This created new “space” for Italian wines in the U.S. market, resulting in sales growth. It’s possible that the Trump trade team will exclude Italian wine on April 2 when they release their final list of tariffed products. Let’s wait and see what happens, he tells his interviewer. It might be good for Italian wine, he notes.

Gaja also expresses his optimism about the end of the war in Ukraine. There will be a lot to celebrate when hostilities cease, he points out. The Russian market will be thirsty for Italian wine, he speculates, once the country opens up again to the world.

Merlo also asks Gaja to share his thoughts on the Italian political class. In his answers, he likens pols to wines. Meloni? A “Lambrusca.”

Screenshot via Il Folio.

A few weeks ago, while pouring and speaking for Abruzzo wines at the Slow Wine Guide tasting in Washington D.C., I had the opportunity to taste with Erlinda Doherty, above.

She’s a D.C.-based lobbyist and sommelier whose consulting business is focused on helping wineries and importers navigate the changing landscape of FDA requirements for imported wines.

Let’s just say that I had a million and one questions for her!

In the meantime, the threat of business-crushing tariffs arrived via tweet.

So, I reached out to Erlinda to see if she’d be willing to do a video chat with me to share here. I quickly realized that there are so many questions and so much to discuss that we would need to do a series of videos to cover the issues. If all goes well, we will! In the meantime, I asked her to share her insider knowledge of how the tariffs work and we began to tackle the new FDA requirements.

I hope you find our conversation as useful as I did. Let me know if you’d like us to continue the series! And thanks for being here.

In other news, the only news about tariffs is that they have been delayed until mid-April. We are all holding our breath and praying that the U.S. and E.U. negotiators can work it out without fiscal violence.

Just this week, one of the largest importers of Italian wine in the U.S. announced that it was placing a hold on all orders. The mere menace of tariffs in a tweet has upended our work. Will this be a temporary disruption or an epochal shift in our industry? Only time will tell at this point.

Stay strong, everyone! Coraggio a tutti noi!

I’ve always said that Italian wine is my signora and French wine is my mistress. I’m a huge Francophile and even played in a French band!

So it was all the more thrilling to me that the Union des Vins Doux de Bordeaux asked me to give them a hand this year organizing trade and media tastings across the U.S. We have some fun cities lined up, including dates for Austin and Houston in April.

But our launch city this year is Tulsa, a town that I’ve been enchanted by on recent visits.

Please help me spread the word and I’ll look forward to a great tasting at one of my favorite wine bars in the country week after next! I hope you can join me. Thanks for the support.

Sweet Bordeaux
wine tasting and seminar
with Bordeaux expert
Emma Baudry
Sweet Wines of Bordeaux Association

Monday, March 31
5-7pm
Vintage Wine Bar
324 E. 1st St.
Tulsa OK 74120

Open to trade and media.

RSVP to Jeremy Parzen at jparzen at gmail.com.

Please join us for a tasting of 15+ sweet wines from Bordeaux, including sparkling wines, with Bordeaux expert Emma Baudry from the Sweet Wines of Bordeaux Association.

The event includes a walk-around tasting from 5-7pm and a guided tasting and seminar, with pairings, from 5:45-6:30pm.

This event is sponsored by the Union des Vines Doux de Bordeaux and the Charming Taste of Europe campaign to promote EU food and wine in North America.

Wine writer and educator Jeremy Parzen, the organizer, will also be pouring and speaking at tasting.

Image via the McGill Library Flickr (Creative Commons).

For today’s post, I have copied and pasted the morning’s communiqué from the U.S. Wine Trade Alliance. Be sure to sign up for their email newsletter for updates and breaking news about tariffs. For what it’s worth, the more calls we make, letters and emails we send, the more our representatives will be aware of the pain this is already causing. Colleagues in red states, especially, should reach out to their congresspeople and senators. Stay strong, everyone!

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

We strongly advise American companies to HALT ALL SHIPMENTS OF WINE, SPIRITS, & BEER FROM THE EU. The current risk of tariffs is too high.

As you know, President Trump issued a threat of 200% tariffs on all alcohol from the EU, in response to planned EU tariffs on U.S. Bourbon and other products. The EU announcement would see tariffs enacted on April 1. We believe it possible the U.S. could immediately retaliate with tariffs on April 2, using a never-before-used section of trade law.

We are working diligently to ensure any tariff enactment would have a goods-on-the-water exception, but the flat reality is right now there is no guarantee of an exception for goods in transit at the time of a tariff enactment.

The disruption this would cause is not lost on us, and we do not take this recommendation lightly. To be clear, no federal register notice on this issue has yet been published, and it is possible either the U.S. or EU could pivot away from the current tit-for-tat, but at this moment there is a risk that goods could be tariffed if they arrive in the U.S. after the beginning of April.

This is not a fight that we are responsible for, but it is a fight we are in nonetheless. We are speaking with agency staff and members of Congress every day, and will follow up with more information as soon as we have it.

Sincerely,

Ben Aneff

This year’s trade fair season has just begun. Thousands of Italian wine professionals have been attending ProWein in Germany over the weekend. Vinitaly, our industry’s main event, and the satellite progressive fairs are coming up in a few weeks.

In any other year, it would be a time for planning, strategizing, networking, and the goliardic camaraderie that accompany the season.

Instead, our industry — across the board — is holding its collective breath as we await the tariffs announced on social media by our despotic president.

According to the most recent data, Italian wine sales in the U.S. have grown by more than 150 percent over the last two decades. In 2023 and 2024, despite industry-wide challenges, Italian wines sales continued to grow in the U.S., the world’s largest consumer of fine wine. Last year, nearly $2 billion of Italian wine were sold here.

Think of the small- or medium-sized businesses like scores of Italian wine importers I know operating in the U.S.

If you are an importer that has a “container on the water,” as the parlance goes, you will potentially owe a 200 percent tax on the entire bill of lading. You can’t just turn the container back. Beyond the big players in big wine, behemoth tax bills like this are going to take many operators down for good.

In the best of times, some of them might be able to make it to the fourth quarter (and potential tariff relief) when most actors account for 50 percent or more of their total sales.

But these are not the best of times: changing consumer habits, consolidation by big wine, and soaring production and logistics costs have been suffocating Italian-wine focused small business. And not just importers and distributors. For those restaurant owners and retailers who rely on Italian wine as part of their brand, the disruption in the flow of wine from Europe will create extreme havoc and severe pain.

Right now, all we can do is wait to see what plays out between Trump and the EU. In the meantime, please remember to support local and regional businesses by drinking a bottle of Italian wine this week. Thanks for your support and solidarity.

“Coraggio a tutti noi!” was the last message received yesterday before my phone was silenced last night. “Stay strong, everyone!”

Italian wine people on both sides of the Atlantic are freaking out after Trump’s post announcing looming 200 percent tariffs on European wines.

For many industry actors, the threat represents an existential crisis.

The U.S. is by far the largest importer and consumer of Italian wine.

The U.S. is also an important media market for Italian wines: high-profile placements in major U.S. cities serve to position the brands on an international level. All those Mionetto umbrellas are good for something, after all.

In my last message to my Italian interlocutors last night, I pointed out — and this is extremely important, Italians! — the tariffs are not yet here. They are most likely coming. But let’s wait for the official declaration (not the Trump post) to see what they will entail.

Colleagues have been asking me questions like: “will they apply to volume or value?” and “will they apply to ex-cellar prices or importers’ wholesale prices?”

The answer is simply that we don’t know and we need to wait and see what they will look like. And we don’t know if they will reach 200 percent, a figure that seems unlikely given the tariffs imposed on China, Canada, and Mexico.

It’s no secret that Trump uses bluster and hyperbole as a negotiating tactic. It’s also clear that Trump will follow through on the threat, as he has done with Canada and Mexico, countries that were once our friends and largest trading partners.

But the way Trump’s post has been reported in mainstream and social media in Italy makes it sounds as if the tariffs are already in place.

Now it’s time to hold tight and prepare. It’s time to band together as community and help one another as partners on both sides of the divide.

There’s going to be sacrifice and there is going to be pain. But we will get through to the other side. For now, let’s wait and see what transpires.

Coraggio a tutti noi! Hang in there, everyone. Stay strong.