A Cautionary Note for Editors Thinking of Assigning a Wine Writer to Business Issues in the Wine Business
by Andrew Chalk
At the Wine Writer’s Symposium a few years ago the agenda featured a panel discussion on whether wine writers should write about the business of wine. I was surprised when all four members of the panel revealed they were hugely enthusiastic about the idea. The organizers had chosen a group of cheerleaders, with not one differing view.
To me, the idea of (most) wine writers doing what amounted to business journalism was stupid. They had got into their field because they swooned at the smell of new French oak casks neatly lined up in the cellar. Or loved the bucolic beauty of rows of vines stretched over the hills as far as the eye could see. They simply weren’t tooled up to give better answers than business journalists of the calibre of those that write for the Wall Street Journal to questions like: Who pays the tariffs? How much does the 3-tier system hurt wine producers? They would be left giving softball interviews to interested parties who would ‘talk their book’, the naive journalist being unequipped to spot when they were being taken for a ride.
Just such an uninformed article appeared last week in The Drinks Business, a wine publication out of the UK. ‘I lost my entire export business overnight’: the toll of Trump’s tariffs on US wine by Amelie Maurice-Jones, extrapolated from an anecdote from one winery to overreaching conclusions about the economy-wide effects of the wine tariff war between the US and Canada. In the process, facts were omitted and invented, and the whole of the US wine industry was forgotten. It was as though Drinks Business Editor-in-Chief, Patrick Schmitt, had arrived at work one morning with a snotty nose and pronounced “there is a flu pandemic”.
Just to set the record state, the optimal tariff level on all wine is 0%. That is, free trade is best for consumers. All tariffs are bad, and it doesn’t matter whether they are initial or retaliatory, Canadian or American. Second, if you are a writer on the topic of tariffs, journalistic standards dictate that you have to leave your prejudices at the door and stick to the facts.
The US imposed tariffs first in the current war (ignore the aircraft subsidy war of earlier years) in March 2025 at a level of 25% on Canadian imports. In eight Canadian provinces the regional politicians infantilized Canadians by banning the purchase and sale of US wine and spirits (Drinks Business, in one of the most bizarre inversions of facts in journalism, called this political action an “act of consumer resistance” [emphasis added]). This was accompanied by lots of low-cost bellyaching by provincial Canadian governors about defending Canadians from Donald Trump. If they got as serious about peeling back the morass of restrictive Canadian laws that inhibit Canadian wine makers (even the most restrictive US control states look almost free-market by comparison) they would really have been doing something useful for Canadians. As it was, the paltry volume of Canadian wine exports to the US ($50m-$65m per year) was countered by grandstanding Canadian politicians who took aim at the $460m of US wine imported. Canadians were made worse off, first by President Trump, but then far worse off by their own clown car of politicians. This was totally lost on Drinks Business because it is not competent to evaluate the effects of tariffs.
Drinks Business deferentially quotes Canadian PM Mark Carney saying that the cost of the import bans on the Canadian economy ‘would be modest’. Why are they quoting him? He is responsible for imposing most of the cost on Canadian consumers. It is like quoting the fox leaving the chicken coop on the ‘trivial’ value of eggs eaten.
And unfortunately, the massive sales growth rates quoted by Canadian winemakers following the imposition of bans on US wine (60%) should not be taken for more than what they are. The Canadian wine industry is so small that just a partial offset of US imported wine sales is a massive relative change for domestic producers.
At this point Drinks Business could have given a much better account of the effect of tariffs if it had gathered systematic data on the increased sales of US wine offsetting imports into the US. They didn’t, because they didn’t know how to analyse the data and, anyway, that was work.
Generally, editors, don’t let your wine writers pretend to be economists, unless they can explain the relevant analytic concepts like price elasticity of demand and cross-price elasticity of substitution. There is lots of scope for articles describing the magic of travelling through cellars of oak barrels and fields of Chardonnay. Stick then to that knitting.
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