Photo by Todd Wight via Flickr.
If you haven’t head about the plan to levy 100% tariffs on European wine (and cheese, whiskey, olive oil, and more food products), you have until January 13th, 2020 to express your displeasure.
This will be a disaster for wineries, importers, distributors, restaurants, and retail shops. My friend Jeremy Parzen of Do Bianchi has written a blog post interviewing those who will be affected. Here’s what Jamie Wolf of Chambers Street Wines in New York has to say:
This is so disastrous that the consequences are hard to wrap my head around, but it looks life-threatening. David Lillie and I have spent 18 years building our business, and it could get wiped out in one blow; for better or worse we’ve tied our love of European wine to the life of our shop. We have 25 employees, many with families; we pay their health insurance; we pay a boatload of taxes. Chambers Street Wines is a micro business, but there are many thousands of employees and owners around the country who will be similarly affected — to say nothing of how this will impact our wine loving customers.
Michael Teer, owner of Seattle’s Pike and Western Wine Shop, had this to say in his weekly newsletter:
We depend on small and large passionate importers to supply us with wine from small, producers throughout France, Italy and Spain, which is about 65% of our business. Their survival, and Pike and Western’s is at stake. We cannot make up for the lost business by selling more local or Southern Hemisphere wine.
Here’s what you can do:
Via the National Association of Wine Retailers:
Contact Your Representative in The US House
Contact Your Representative in the US Senate
Via regulations.gov:
