When the United States and the European Union finally buried the hatchet in June 2021 regarding their long-standing dispute over government subsidies for Boeing and Airbus, wine lovers in the US may well have opened a bottle of Bordeaux to celebrate. This might sound strange; after all, what does wine have to do with airline subsidies? In reality, it makes perfect sense. Wine was one of the products caught in a "tit-for-tat" tariff war, in which the Donald Trump administration imposed a 25% duty on certain European food and drink items, including wines from Germany, Spain, France and the United Kingdom. These tariffs were lifted last year in an effort to improve transatlantic relations, which had cooled significantly during Trump's time in office.

As shown in the graph, the American love for wines from Southern Europe, particularly France and Italy, is one-sided.

According to data from the European Commission's Directorate-General for Agriculture and Rural Development, the US imported nearly six million hectolitres of wine from France and Italy between 1 August 2020 and 31 July 2021, worth more than 3.5 billion US dollars. Although Italy was the largest exporter to the US in terms of volume, France leads in monetary terms, thanks to its more expensive products. Meanwhile, the four largest European wine exporters imported less than 50,000 hectolitres of wine from the US, choosing instead, to borrow a quote from the film "Scarface", to "get high on their own supply..."