How to talk about wine tariffs with your guests
Here's a moment to talk, drink in hand, about how this is about more than tariffs.
Bars have always served as “third places”—the places beyond home and work where we go to decompress, connect with others, and be human. Throughout history, they’ve been keys to friendship, mutual aid, information sharing, and they have buoyed resistance movements. Not to romanticize alcohol, for there is a dark side to bars, but the bright side is that a familiar face and a well-loved drink are disarming like nothing else. And these days, there’s always an N/A option on tap.
As usual, your guests will belly up to your bar or collapse onto your vintage couch, ready to talk about what’s happening now. This week it will be tariffs. Many of them will want your insight as a person who works in the industry. If they do, it’s an opportunity to begin with tariffs and end up somewhere more poignant. Of course, staff members have to follow company policies around talking politics (unless you’re ready to risk it all, and maybe you are?). But leadership should consider the position of narrative power they wield in their community, and if the current policy is to avoid politics, maybe they should imagine what life could be like if they let the people on the front lines of their business tell your guests how they really feel.
Either way, there are ways to politely approach the glaring fact that this administration is working to make us all poorer. This piece in Wine Searcher is a good one to share with guests who want to understand how this will affect wine, and it’s an excellent segue into how our farmers are already hurting—bad. You could talk about how climate change is making it harder to make wine, and watching this, we can understand what’s happening to our food systems. Now that’s scary.
You can talk about how deportation scare tactics and kidnappings are terrorizing our agricultural workforce, making it harder for them to organize for their rights—let alone show up for work.
You can talk about how yes, local wine matters, but there’s no framing this in a way that American wine wins. Our local farmers will now pay more to import equipment and glass bottles, and to stay afloat, they’ll have to transfer that cost to the consumer. Raising the prices of imported wines won’t convince people to instead pay $35 for that local bottle of wine when we’ve spent the last several decades insisting that it’s just not as good as a $20 European wine. Tablas Creek does a better job of explaining how this will hurt the local industry than I can, so you can share this with your guests if you’re not allowed to go on a political rant on the clock.
Here is some more reading to share with anyone who wants to understand how the wine tariffs work and who they serve.
Staying neutral isn’t helping you connect to your consumers.
During Trump’s first term, I worked in a restaurant with a strict no-talking-politics policy, but the owner openly talked about how tariffs were hurting him. When Roe v. Wade was overturned, I was at another wine bar in the only neighborhood in my city with any counter-culture left, one that was quickly gentrifying. Several of us on staff bought matching shirts that read:
pro-scuitto& pro-choice& pro-secco
When I tell you the guests went crazy for these shirts! It was very live-laugh-love but edgier. None of us worked a single shift where several women didn’t ask where to buy one. But one day, an older white man came in, and he didn’t like the shirt. He took to Yelp to complain about being personally attacked by our hyper-political shirts, and the owner of the bar made sure we didn’t wear them again. It was a missed opportunity for someone who had only, in the last few years, moved into a notoriously rebellious neighborhood to open his business. Our manager, who organized the purchase of our shirts, didn’t even try to suggest that maybe the owner, who had a young daughter, might not want to let this Yelp reviewer silence his staff on the topic of reproductive autonomy.
Don’t be like these dudes. Take a stance. Just look at Bernie and AOC’s “Fight the Oligarchy” tour for proof of concept that people want to be inspired out of this mess. These tariffs aren’t about preserving our local industry, they’re about making the poor poorer so the rich can become richer. If you don’t see that, study. If you do, tell your people.
