With Trump tariffs, Oregon wine is over a barrel

Yahoo

10-04-2025

President Donald Trump's tariffs are hurting Oregon's wine business. (Oregon Department of Agriculture/Flickr)
One of the first Oregon impacts of this year's international trade wars came to our house in a pleasing way: in the form of a few bottles of good wine, gifts from friends who work in that industry. We live in the north Willamette wine country, where personal connections to the wine industry are not hard to find.
Those bottles were emblematic, though, of a bigger situation not nearly so benign.
Some weeks ago, as wineries in our region packed and sent crates of wine north to Canada as they long have done, they encountered a surprise. The border was as far as many of them got, and their wine had to be trucked back, unsold, to Oregon.
Canada had essentially stopped accepting alcohol from the U.S., including Oregon alcohol. The response and rules at the border have shifted, but sales are being heavily impacted by President Donald Trump's recent tariff announcements.
Many Oregon winemakers are accumulating a wine surplus. Some, probably small but unknown numbers of cases, may be turning into giveaways, pleasant for the recipients but lousy for a wine producer's bottom line.
The massive worldwide tariffs Trump promised — and then announced he would pause for 90 days — can be expected to further dampen the state's wine trade. Wine is a smaller part of Oregon's trade picture than some other commodities, but it offers a useful insight into how the tariffs are affecting the state. And it is a major industry in Oregon, with about 1,100 wineries statewide.
Last week, a friend who had worked in wine import and export described for me how the system worked.
When shipped internationally, the product changed ownership — from the producer or wholesaler to my friend's own company — before it crossed the border, so that when the shipment cleared customs, his company paid the tariff or fees (where they existed).
That was the first impact of a tariff. Companies ordinarily factor tariffs into the retail price, and individual wine buyers ultimately pay most or all of that cost. That boosted purchase price is how most people experience tariffs.
The existence of a tariff doesn't keep something from crossing national lines, and a small tariff may not matter much, but large ones can change the business incentives for all parties.
Oregon wine makers might in one way, at first, benefit from higher tariffs on the countries (such as Italy, Chile, Australia, Argentina and many more) that import wine into the U.S where they are imposed.
That might drive some domestic wine drinkers toward more American producers, which could help Oregon wine producers, though it usually has the effect of raising domestic prices as well.
Other aspects of higher border-crossing prices are likely to cut against the industry.
Some of those are smaller and might not be especially visible outside the industry, such as higher prices paid by the Oregon industry for imported barrels, steel for supplies and equipment, production equipment and more.
Oregon's leading export targets overall are (in order) Mexico, China and Canada, and about 81,000 jobs are reliant on that export trade. The impact on trade may be easier to observe in the wine industry, because close to half of all Oregon wine exports go (or in recent years have gone) to Canada: In 2022, that was 73,323 cases of a total export of 162,939.
'We're just watching it play out in real time, and it's not pretty,' Alex Sokol Blosser, president of Sokol Blosser Winery in Dayton, Oregon, said in a recent KGW interview. 'All that business we worked for, and the president lit a match to it.'
Anne Amie vineyards, near Carlton, has been moving from local tasting room sales toward an all-wholesale model, and one significant element of that has been a large prospective sale — thousands of cases — to a buyer in Quebec.
Negotiations had been active for months, but after recent Trump trade announcements, Canadians ended them. Other wineries have had comparable experiences.
There are ripple effects through many other industries as well.
The US Wine Trade Alliance argued on April 2 that 'restaurants will suffer, domestic producers will face new obstacles in bringing their wines to market, and retailers, importers, and distributors across the country will be placed at serious risk. With their biggest profit center decimated, many restaurant investors will decide to take their money elsewhere.'
Last week, thousands of Oregonians showed at up the Hands Off anti-Trump rallies around the state, and plenty of signs criticized the new tariffs. I didn't see any that complained specifically about administration impacts on the wine industry. But it wouldn't be surprising if, in coming weeks, they start to appear.
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