ORLANDO, Fla. – Rob Chase has worked in the restaurant industry for nearly 20 years.
The Orlando business owner has experienced it all, from the 2008 financial crisis to the near closure of his wine bar during the pandemic.
One of the tougher times he recalls was in 2019 when the United States announced a 25% tariff on most wines from multiple European countries.
Even if that was over five years ago and the tariff was suspended in 2021, he said he is still feeling the impact of that decision to this day.
“When these tariffs came around the first time, it’s not like when they were lifted prices went back to normal. People were more than happy to maintain and take the extra profit. I think I might have had one, perhaps two distributors that actually dialed back their prices,” Chase said.
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Chase opened Digress Wine Bar in Orlando’s College Park in 2017. Located at 1215 Edgewater Drive, it operates as a restaurant, bar and shop featuring over 200 bottles of wine.
The tariffs were put in place under the Trump administration and with him and his team set to return to office soon, Chase said he will be monitoring this transition of power.
“We never really know what the climate’s going to look like from year to year, especially with this transitional sort of period,” he said. “You know, the biggest concern is, of course, that people are going to be spending less.”
To add on, The Good Pour, a recently-opened Orlando wine shop, is also looking out for any potential tariffs that might be brought by the Trump administration.
Ray Horal, who is one of the founders of the shop, said in a prepared statement that inflation is already impacting consumers’ decisions, so any price increase from tariffs can cause customers to change their buying habits even more.
“We hope that any decisions around tariffs take into consideration the broader impact on small businesses, consumers, and the industry as a whole,” Horal said.
Meanwhile, these tariffs were put in place by Trump in 2019 to address the World Trade Organization ruling that the European Union was not complying with an order to end illegal subsidies for plane-marker Airbus.
The Biden administration and the European Union agreed to put the tariffs on hold for five years in 2021.
Ben Aneff, president of the U.S. Wine Trade Alliance, explained that the tariffs didn’t work because it did not do damage to Europe, but instead to small businesses in the U.S.
He said this happened because the wine industry is different from others as it has a “three-tier system.”
“A wine producer in France is going to sell to a U.S.-owned wine importer. They’re going to sell to a U.S.-owned wine distributor who is then going to sell to a U.S.-owned restaurant or a U.S.-owned retailer like me or someone in Orlando,” Aneff explained.
Through this system, a dollar spent on imported wine from Europe can lead to a U.S. business making nearly $5 from it, he said.
All in all, Aneff hopes that with Trump’s return to office, his administration does not propose to bring back this wine tariff when the tariff hold term expires.
“Our hope is that when the administration starts to finalize their trade policy, they’re going to understand that trying to solve, let’s say, the Airbus issue or a digital services tax problem with Europe, it’s not very well done by putting the burden on American businesses like restaurants and wine stores and bars, but targeting products where most of the damage stays overseas and they have plenty of options that can ensure the damage from tariffs stays in their target countries,” Aneff said.
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