Trump Tariffs Have Made This the Worst Time for American Wine in Literally Decades

Back at the end of the 2010s, as cracks first began to form in the facade of an American craft brewing industry that had been sailing merrily along for 15+ years of constant growth, you used to hear the first souls worried about craft beer’s trajectory complain that all the interest had shifted to “wine and spirits.” Fast forward to today, and craft beer has now been in veritable freefall for half a decade, with more closures than openings, a decline of consumer interest, and more disparate economic challenges than you can likely imagine. But another thing has also changed: “Wine” is no longer being mentioned by anyone as the place where those consumers ran off to, or any kind of safe port in the ongoing storm. American wine had been on a steady growth curve of its own for literally decades before said growth tapered off following the mid-pandemic boom. But even “tapering growth” would be a godsend right now, because the U.S. wine industry in 2026 has people using words like “bloodbath” and “catastrophic.” There are many reasons for this, but if you want the most dramatic contributor to why, say, the nation of Canada consumed almost 80% less American wine last year that it did in 2024, you’d of course have Donald Trump’s capricious and illegal tariffs to thank. For many American wineries, Trump was signing their death warrant.

That percentage was no misprint. In response to President Donald Trump placing ever-shifting, chaos-laden blanket tariffs on various nations including close U.S. allies such as Canada, those nations have increasingly responded by simply moving on from the notion of buying or consuming American beverage alcohol products, particularly wine. A recent report from trade group The Wine Institute, using U.S. Census Bureau data, concluded that the American wine industry lost approximately $357 million in export revenue to Canada alone in 2025, or a 78% reduction from the amount of American wine that was exported to Canada in 2024, amid distributors choosing not to stock American products and a stunningly successful “Buy Canadian Instead” campaign for consumers. Which is to say, all American wine exports to Canada are now basically a fifth of what they were only a year prior. And oh, Canada was the single largest export market for American-made wine. The report describes this single factor as “the most catastrophic single-year trade disruption in the history of U.S. wine exports.” Seems bad.

Trump's tariff war is crushing American alcohol makers with a – 91 percent decline in US wine sales to Canada

Canadians are showing the world how to be united in their boycotts.

We need to keep the momentum going and double down on Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Apple!

www.msn.com/en-us/money/…

— Purchase with Purpose (@purchase-w-purpose.bsky.social) Jan 31, 2026 at 10:17 AM

But it wasn’t just Canada, either. Wine exports from the United States also cratered around the rest of the world as well to smaller degrees, resulting in overall exports dropping by $428 million in 2025. In total, that represents a 33.5% drop from 2024, which is an absolutely devastating decline that would have most any industry reeling–in total, U.S. wine exports dropped below $1 billion for the first time since 2009. The Canadian numbers, however, are obviously the most glaring–all of the lost sales there equal roughly 81% of the exports that the industry lost in 2025, and those losses are almost entirely related to tariffs.

At least the tariffs were generating revenue–for the federal government–though, right? Sure, in theory, although they may or may not have to refund that revenue to a still-undetermined someone following the Supreme Court’s recent finding that Trump’s arbitrary tariffs were illegal. Once again, however, the import side of the tariff equation fucked over American companies almost exclusively: The American Association of Wine Economists and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York estimate that of the $492 million collected in tariffs on imported wine in 2025, some 90% or more of that cost was ultimately paid by United States importers and consumers who paid higher prices for the products.

"American alcohol remains the only product completely barred from import in nearly all Canadian provinces. Full-year 2025 data now confirms this is the most catastrophic single-year trade disruption in the history of U.S. wine exports."

wineinstitute.org/wp-content/u…

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— Dave Infante (@dinfontay.com) Mar 14, 2026 at 12:20 PM

It’s not like the American wine industry was in a great place even before tariffs blew in and effectively nuked our #1 export destination. Like so many other corners of the beverage alcohol world, wine faces huge challenges: Generally falling alcohol consumption, rising inflation putting pressure on prices, the rise of beverage alternatives such as THC-infused drinks or the potential downward pressure of GLP-1 drugs, and a distinct sense of general economic precariousness. Demographics are a major factor as well: The golden goose of the American wine industry, baby boomers, are aging out, decreasing their consumption and dying off, taking their discretionary spending with them, while the younger drinking generations aren’t plunking down cash on $500 investment bottles of Napa Cabernet like the Boomers did. There’s little question that they can’t afford it.

Tariffs, however, have just taken a bad situation and made it into an extremely dire one, not only because they’ve caused retaliatory tariffs and bans, as in Canada, but because they’ve so screwed with the supply chain that it’s made the business model untenable even for American wineries that still find themselves with people wanting to buy the product. The sheer unpredictability of Trump’s on-again, off-again tariff approach has made it impossible for wineries to depend on any kind of consistency in the bulk orders they have to make for products such as glass bottles, which are one of the biggest expenses in the winemaking process. And yet the cost of glass has fluctuated wildly thanks to those same tariffs. As Charles Jefferson, the vice president of federal and international public policy for The Wine Institute succinctly put it: “We can’t operate in an environment where tariffs are shifting on a day-to-day basis.” In 2026 alone, there have already been “four possible tariff rates in just the past few weeks.” How the fuck can one possibly plan for that?

One of the main results of American wine’s cratering has been a huge oversupply of wine grapes, a glut problem that experts have seen coming as a potential hurdle for years. A Forbes report in November found that at least 20% of California’s wine grapes would not be harvested and crushed in 2025, either left to rot in the vine or ripped up, and that number is potentially as high as 30% in places like Sonoma. This is a necessary correction from an economic standpoint, because if demand is falling, then the supply of grapes must fall to meet it, but good luck saying that in conversation to someone whose livelihood has been tied up in decades of carefully nursing vineyard grapes. No one wants to spend 20 years producing passable Syrah, only to be told to rip all of those vines out of the ground.

“It’s a bloodbath for all grape growers across California,” said Stuart Spencer, the Executive Director of the Lodi Wine Grape Commission, to Forbes. “It is the worst market condition growers have seen in their lifetime, with farmers in their 80s telling me they have never seen it this bad before.”

A report earlier this month from the NY Fed found ~90% of Trump's tariffs were borne by US businesses, so the White House owes American wine importers a ~$440 million refund for last year's self-inflicted shitshow. libertystreeteconomics.newyorkfed.org/2026/02/who-…

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— Dave Infante (@dinfontay.com) Feb 28, 2026 at 1:06 PM

Predictably, this has been more than plenty of wineries could bear, resulting in waves of closures among American wineries that are only accelerating at the moment. The total number of wineries operating in the U.S. fell by 3% in 2025, from 11,450 to an estimated 11,107. That’s a loss of 343 wineries, working out to almost one closure every day. From every corner, the industry is roiled right now–and that’s not even getting into the huge story of how wine industry distribution has collapsed and consolidated, which would easily be worthy of thousands of words on its own.

It’s sort of ironic, at the end of the day, that despite the beverage alcohol industry fearing that a second Trump administration might sting them by embracing puritanical attitudes toward alcohol, they ultimately shrugged and essentially declined to even engage with the question of alcohol’s health effects when they released revamped Dietary Guidelines for Americans in January. That decision alone arguably makes the second Trump administration more friendly in a general sense to the idea of ethanol consumption than any previous administration that more directly noted alcohol’s health risks, even though the President himself is famously a teetotaler. Despite giving in to alcohol industry lobbyists on that front, however, Trump 2.0 has ultimately been massively damaging to the booze industry (and especially wine) as a whole for entirely other reasons, namely tariffs. At this point, U.S. winemakers would gladly trade this version of economic suicide for a revised Dietary Guidelines that simply reads “NO BOOZE,” because at least people could choose to ignore that.

If you’re wondering, by the way, how any of this affects Trump’s own Virginia-based branded winery, well … they never report sales numbers (shocker). Considering that the President has not-at-all-corruptly managed to triple or quadruple his net worth in a year since returning to office, however, I’d say he can probably afford some rotten grapes on the vine. Your local winery, on the other hand, probably isn’t so fortunate.