That makes sense at that price range. Just an alternate view I know some wine stores in areas where people have fled the city that are selling enormous amounts of German wine. Same for a few neighborhood type stores in NYC.
Here is one such example in Kingston, NY. 43 SKUs for German wine! I think their price points help and also they have a number that fit into the Natural wine camp. One thing for sure is that they are selling a lot of German wine and much more than last year. And they actually promote it. Fantastic shop, BTW.
Whatever the disputes, this whole exercise seems pointless. Are the negotiations going anywhere? Nope. Are we alienating other countries who should have skin in the game for many larger issues? (Like China trade) Probably. We should be working out better agreements with the Euros instead of making more worldwide enemies. I say we support Biden in re thinking the whole exercise rather than hoping for a million workarounds to import wineâŚ
Does anyone understand why the ABV limit was put in the law? I know the whole thing doesnât make any sense, but wouldnât one think that if part of the goal was to protect domestic wines from competition it would be flipped? ie wines above a certain percentage would be taxed. Iâve looked for this elsewhere before and havenât found anything⌠sorry if this has been addressed elsewhere.
The 25% tariffs had nothing to do with protecting domestic wine production. The tariffs were meant as a punitive slap at EU countries that supported Airbus. Whacking wine, cheese and olive oil producers was supposed to make the European public scream at the EU to change its practices. Turns out itâs mostly just making people even madder at the US administration. COVID also (understandably) took eyes off the trade war.
So in other words, this is a waste of time. As citizens perhaps we can make that known eventuallyâŚat least for all of us who survive the next 6 months!
If you read the real thread on the tariffs (instead of this useless offshoot) you will see that there is a public comment process. People who post here have provided those comments, and some (e.g. Nola) have been even more involved. Your comments about people making their opinions known indicate that you have a little reading to do in the other thread.
There isnât an ABV limit per se, there are just different âcodesâ for different categories of goods. As I understand it, and I can certainly stand to be corrected, the US has always drawn a line between âhigh alcoholâ and âlow alcoholâ wines, primarily for excise tax purposes, and that line happens to be 14%. So wines above that pay higher excise taxes and wines below that pay lower. This has nothing to do with tariffs, but because of the tax difference, there is a different import code for wine below 14 and wine above, just like there is a different category for sparkling wine.
So the US had choices, and chose the put the tariffs on some categories and not others. Some of the choices seem obvious - Italian wines didnât get hit because thereâs less of a link between Italy and Airbus, for example. Others, less so - why still wines below 14 and not still wines above and not sparkling wines? Part of the answer is that the win in the case gave the US a certain dollar amount of goods upon which it could impose the tariffs, so at some point they had to stop. The rest of the answer is âwho knows?â
Thatâs basically right, I believe. Under the ruling in the Boeing/Airbus case, the US was entitled to slap duties on $X billion of goods. The picked categories (a) that added up to that amount and (b) created the maximum political pressure on the Europeans. As I recall, German machine tools got hit â a major German export.
Airbus is a Anglo-Franco-Germano-Spanish consortium, so Italian wines were not included.
And there has been some discussion by the outgoing administration, as I understand it, of using a âcarouselâ approach to spread the pain for greater impact, under which every so often, some products get off and others get on. Under this approach, the tariff might be applied to still wine under 14 (but not still wine over 14 or sparkling wine) for 6 months and then applied to sparkling wine (but not still wine) for six months and then removed from all wine and applied to cheese and auto parts, or whatever, for six months, etc. Despite this discussion, however, they donât seem to have done this, at least with respect to beverage alcohol where the categories have not changed a bit since these tariffs were first imposed in October of 2019.
While you may be playing it safe, the import figures James cited in the OP certainly raise questions. And a friend of mine just e-mailed to say that he noticed the ABV on a 2016 Rhone wine he owns was stated at 12.5% but the 2017 and 2018 of the same wine have identical back labels that list alcohol of 14.2%. Makes you wonderâŚ
