Wine Businesses Fear Disaster in Threat of Huge Tariffs

President Trump’s threat to impose 200 percent fees on European wines could harm importers, distributors, retailers and restaurants without necessarily helping U.S. producers.

It’s not clear who will benefit if President Trump follows through on his threat to impose 200 percent tariffs on all wines and alcoholic beverages from the European Union, but it certainly would not be American consumers.

The tariff warning was posted by Mr. Trump on social media Thursday in retaliation to 50 percent tariffs on American whiskey and several other products announced by the European Union, which were themselves a response to a set of U.S. tariffs that took effect last week.

Mr. Trump said in his post that tariffs “will be great for the wine and Champagne businesses in the U.S.” But American wine producers don’t necessarily see it that way.

“On the surface, it may look like a boon, but if you look underneath, I think you realize it’s really damaging to our industry at a time when we really don’t need this,” said John Williams, the proprietor of Frog’s Leap, a family-run wine producer in the Napa Valley.

For most wine producers, sales depend on an interconnected web of small businesses — distributors, retailers and restaurateurs among them — that also depend on the sales of European wines.

“I don’t think people realize how much the wine infrastructure relies on European sales,” said Chris Leon, owner of Leon & Son, a wine retailer in Brooklyn, N.Y. “If you deplete those funds from the equation, you reduce the opportunity to buy wines from other places. You’re not just hurting European wines, you’re hurting the chances of Americans to buy American wines.”