A few weeks ago, while pouring and speaking for Abruzzo wines at the Slow Wine Guide tasting in Washington D.C., I had the opportunity to taste with Erlinda Doherty, above.
She’s a D.C.-based lobbyist and sommelier whose consulting business is focused on helping wineries and importers navigate the changing landscape of FDA requirements for imported wines.
Let’s just say that I had a million and one questions for her!
In the meantime, the threat of business-crushing tariffs arrived via tweet.
So, I reached out to Erlinda to see if she’d be willing to do a video chat with me to share here. I quickly realized that there are so many questions and so much to discuss that we would need to do a series of videos to cover the issues. If all goes well, we will! In the meantime, I asked her to share her insider knowledge of how the tariffs work and we began to tackle the new FDA requirements.
I hope you find our conversation as useful as I did. Let me know if you’d like us to continue the series! And thanks for being here.
In other news, the only news about tariffs is that they have been delayed until mid-April. We are all holding our breath and praying that the U.S. and E.U. negotiators can work it out without fiscal violence.
Just this week, one of the largest importers of Italian wine in the U.S. announced that it was placing a hold on all orders. The mere menace of tariffs in a tweet has upended our work. Will this be a temporary disruption or an epochal shift in our industry? Only time will tell at this point.
Stay strong, everyone! Coraggio a tutti noi!
Jeremy Parzen 
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