TERROIR
THE FEATURE
Italy’s €7.7B Wine Export Reset: Tariffs, Tumbling US Volumes, and Why Germany Held
For most of a year, the Italian wine trade did its planning in pencil: a tariff threatened, imposed, struck down in an American courtroom, then reimposed under a different statute. On July 1 the United States and the European Union settled on a flat 15 percent duty through 2029. Italy closed 2025 at $8.7 billion in exports, down 3.7 percent. Read in the spring, a bad year to be survived. Read against a wall standing until 2029, the first sketch of a new map.
Almost all the damage came from one market: exports to the United States fell 9.2 percent, nearly 60 percent of the entire deficit. Germany held flat at $1.29 billion. A bottle from Veneto to Düsseldorf crosses no tariff line and is priced in the currency it was made in. The rate is fixed now. The market it applies to is not.
THE DISPATCH
Latest from this week
Napa Valley’s Beaulieu Vineyard Reopens After Two-Year Restoration
Beaulieu Vineyard reopened its restored 1880s stone winery to the public on July 13, ending a two-year renovation by Signum Architecture. The Rutherford estate, founded in 1900 by Georges and Fernande de Latour and later shaped by the enologist André Tchelistcheff, now runs seven tasting spaces and its first dedicated culinary program. Ninety-nine percent of the construction material was recycled or repurposed, and solar covers more than 30 percent of the winery’s electricity against a carbon-neutral target of 2030. Preservation rather than pastiche, on the site that helped define American Cabernet.
Champagne Growers Forecast A 10% Yield Cut And The Earliest Harvest On Record
Maxime Toubart, who chairs the Champagne growers’ union, told Reuters on July 7 that the region expects yields roughly 10 percent below 2025, with picking likely to begin around August 15—what would be the earliest official harvest the region has recorded. A late-June heatwave has run into a fourth week with no meaningful rain forecast. Bordeaux’s Crémant producers expect to pick in the first week of August, Burgundy around August 20. It is the second quantified shock to hit Champagne this year: April frost took 40 percent of the buds.
THE PICK
BARONE RICASOLI BROLIO CHIANTI CLASSICO RISERVA 2022
The Ricasoli family has held Castello di Brolio, in the hills south of Siena, since 1141. In 1872 Baron Bettino Ricasoli wrote the letter codifying the Sangiovese-led formula the Chianti Classico consorzio still traces to; his descendants farm inside the rulebook he drafted. The Riserva is less a separate vineyard than a cellar decision: lots drawn from five soil types across the estate, held longer in tonneaux, about a third of them new. Dried cherry, woodland earth, tannins with a spine.
House style rather than a statement bottle, Chianti Classico arguing for the region’s middle register instead of chasing power. At $28.97, marked down from $35, it asks less than the Riserva tier usually does, and wants something plain alongside it: bistecca, white beans, good oil. The estate that wrote the rules is still the clearest place to learn them.
Until next Thursday,
Adrian, TERROIR