US wine importers and bars nervously wait for tariff decision: ‘It’s a sad situation’

Employees line up bottles at the bottling section in a winery in France, on 18 March. Photograph: Guillaume Horcajuelo/EPA

As the threat of exorbitant US tariffs on European alcohol imports looms, a warehouse in the French port city of Le Havre awaits a delivery of more than 1,000 cases of wine from a dozen boutique wineries across the country.

Under normal circumstances, Randall Bush, the founder of Loci Wine in Chicago, would have already arranged with his European partners to gather these wines in Le Havre, the last stop before they are loaded into containers and shipped across the Atlantic. But these wines won’t be arriving stateside anytime soon.