Dallas Restaurants on Trump's Proposed 200% Tariff on European Wine and Champagne

Count on date night costing more — perhaps much more — if and when the threatened Trump wine tariffs take effect. That’s the word from Dallas restaurants, as well as a national group of retailers, restaurateurs and importers who held an online news conference this week to warn diners to get ready to pony up.

“I woke up this morning to the chilling headlines about 200% tariffs,” says Jennifer Uygur of the acclaimed Lucia in Oak Cliff, where most of the wines come from the European Union — which the president threatened with an unprecedented three-figure tariff in his latest effort to remake the world trading order.

“We’re one of the restaurants that tries to keep our wine prices reasonable,” says Uygur, whose husband David Uygur oversees Lucia’s kitchen. “If we do have tariffs that aren’t reasonable, we’re going to have to give careful thought, figure out how we’re going to tweak prices.”

That was also the message from the U.S. Wine Trade Alliance, which briefed reporters on its efforts to prevent new tariffs. The alliance said these tariffs could shutter thousands of family-owned restaurants and wine shops and cost as many as tens of thousands of Americans their jobs.
The news conference came after Trump’s pronouncement on Truth Social Wednesday that he was ready to impose a 200% tariff on European wine, Champagne and spirits if the European Union goes forward with a planned tariff on American whisky, set for April 1. The whisky levy was in response to steel and aluminum tariffs recently imposed by the Trump Administration, all of which are part of the continuing tit-for-tat in a trade dispute with the European Union that dates to Trump’s first presidency and started in response to EU airplane parts subsidies.

At Wednesday’s wine trade group briefing, Texas restaurateur Lisa Perini was blunt about price increases coming from any new tariffs: “Where is the point of resistance for the consumer?"

The Perini family’s eponymous steakhouse in Buffalo Gap, near Abilene, is well-known for its commitment to wine and is the site of one of the state’s most influential wine events each spring. Nevertheless, Perini said, new tariffs will force the family to make hard choices about employment and what it puts on its menu. She explained that the profit on a $50 ribeye dinner, with a glass of water instead of wine, is just a couple of bucks. Tariff-induced price increases will almost certainly force more diners to forgo wine, making it that much more difficult for the family to run the restaurant profitably and up to its award-winning standards.

That’s something that Uygur understands all too well.

“All we want is for our customers to have a good dinner and tasty wine,” she says, “and restaurants don’t like to talk about this. But I wanted to talk about it because it’s something our customers need to know, about just how hard the past months have been with price increases and so forth. I thought we would get a breather after Covid, but I guess not.”