France used the Dublin trade ministers’ meeting to press Washington for a wine and spirits carve-out from the 15 percent transatlantic tariff, invoking the Irish whiskey exemption as precedent and testing the limits of the Turnberry framework
DUBLIN, Oct. 24, 2026
France has renewed its campaign for United States tariff exemptions on wine and spirits, including Champagne and cognac, arguing that the carve-out President Donald Trump announced for Irish whiskey last month establishes a precedent that French producers are entitled to invoke.
French trade minister Nicolas Forissier made the case on Oct. 23, speaking ahead of an informal meeting of European Union trade ministers in Dublin held under Ireland’s Council presidency, according to a report by MLex. Forissier said he had recently raised the request with U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer and intended to keep raising it.
“Each time I meet an American leader, I’m asking for it on behalf of France,” Forissier said. Pointing to the Irish precedent, he noted that Irish whiskeys “have no duties now” and said “it should be the same for French cognac.”
The intervention is significant less for what it asks than for what it concedes. Forissier described the Turnberry Agreement, the framework that caps most U.S. tariffs on European Union goods at 15 percent, as a positive structure that set useful limits. His argument is not that the framework has failed but that it was always understood to be a floor for further negotiation, and that wine and spirits should be first in line.
The Irish precedent
The precedent France is invoking is unusual in both its origin and its status.
Trump announced the removal of U.S. tariffs on Irish whiskey while wrapping up remarks at the Irish Open prize-giving ceremony at his Doonbeg golf resort in September. The announcement was not trailed in advance, did not emerge from a formal trade process, and did not come with an implementing instrument.
The tariff history behind it is layered. U.S. duties on Irish whiskey reached 15 percent last year, were subsequently reduced to 10 percent, and under the announced change would be eliminated entirely. Taoiseach Micheal Martin had raised the issue directly with Trump during their meeting in Dublin last month.
A month on, the exemption has not taken effect. A spokesman for Foreign Affairs Minister Helen McEntee said the United States and Ireland are working intensively on technical implementation with the aim of finalizing it as soon as possible. That gap between announcement and implementation is now itself part of the story, because it demonstrates that a single-product carve-out from a framework agreement requires legal machinery that the framework did not anticipate.
For France, the delay is less important than the principle. If one member state’s signature export can be lifted out of the 15 percent ceiling by presidential announcement, the ceiling is negotiable product by product, and the only question is who asks and how persuasively.
Turnberry and the architecture of the 15 percent ceiling
The framework Forissier is working within took shape over twelve months and three instruments.
On July 27, 2025, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and President Trump announced a bilateral tariff and trade agreement. On July 31, 2025, Trump signed an executive order establishing a 15 percent ceiling on U.S. tariffs applied to European Union imports. On Aug. 21, 2025, the two sides issued a Joint Statement setting out details, including product-specific tariff exemptions and, critically for the current dispute, a commitment to “consider other sectors and products that are important for their economies.”
The European side completed its implementation a year later. Two legislative proposals giving effect to the European Union’s tariff commitments were published in the Official Journal on June 30, 2026 and entered into force on July 1, 2026.
Wine and spirits were not among the exempted products. spiritsEUROPE, the Brussels trade association, welcomed the implementation on July 1 while making clear that the sector regarded itself as unfinished business. Director General Mark Titterington called the implementation “a welcome milestone that strengthens stability in transatlantic trade,” and added that “EU spirits are a natural priority for further progress, and restoring zero-tariff treatment would reinforce this partnership.”
The association’s reasoning rests on an asymmetry that is unusual in trade disputes. The U.S. most-favored-nation tariff rate on distilled spirits is zero. Before the current tariff cycle, European spirits entered the United States duty free, and American spirits entered the European Union on the same basis. The 10 percent rate European spirits faced under Section 122, and the 15 percent they were expected to face once the Section 301 investigations concluded in July 2026, were not adjustments to an existing tariff. They were the imposition of a tariff where none had existed for decades.
A separate layer expired in the same period. Tariffs of 25 percent on European and American spirits linked to the long-running large civil aircraft dispute had been suspended from July 11, 2021 and the suspension ran to July 11, 2026. spiritsEUROPE has pressed both sides to move toward permanent removal rather than renewed suspension.
The association also asked the United States to keep tariffs arising from new Section 301 investigations within the agreed 15 percent ceiling on European Union exports, a request that reflects how many separate statutory tracks now bear on a single bottle of cognac.
The damage already recorded
The commercial case France is making rests on data that the French industry published in February and that has not improved since.
The Federation des Exportateurs de Vins et Spiritueux de France reported on Feb. 10, 2026 that French wine and spirits exports fell 8 percent in value in 2025 to 14.3 billion euros, roughly 17 billion dollars, with volume down 3 percent to 168 million cases. Measured against 2022, export value has fallen 17 percent. The sector has slipped from France’s second-largest export sector to third, behind aerospace and cosmetics.
The United States accounted for the steepest decline. Sales to the U.S. market fell 21 percent to 3.0 billion euros, with volume dropping below 30 million cases. FEVS attributed the fall to higher tariffs on U.S.-bound shipments and to the chilling effect of threatened tariffs, including proposals at rates as high as 200 percent, which weighed particularly on the second half of the year.
“There is a real decline in the United States,” FEVS Chairman Gabriel Picard said.
China compounded the problem. Sales there fell 20 percent to 767 million euros as anti-dumping duties curtailed shipments of cognac, armagnac, and other wine-based spirits. Cognac exports to China fell 15 percent in volume and 24 percent in value. Picard said geopolitical tensions “marked the end of cognac in China.”
Europe held steady at 4.1 billion euros, with United Kingdom volumes up 3 percent. Smaller markets provided partial offsets: South Africa rose 22 percent to 182 million euros, with growth also recorded in Vietnam, the Philippines, and Australia.
Picard said he expected support from new European Union trade agreements with India and the Mercosur bloc, but warned that 2026 could remain difficult without improved market access, and that a further volume correction was possible.
For cognac specifically, the squeeze has been two-sided. The region’s producers face Chinese anti-dumping duties on one flank and U.S. tariffs on the other, in a category where those two markets have historically accounted for the overwhelming majority of exports. Reporting earlier this year documented a 34 percent slide in cognac exports to North America and a 15.1 percent fall in global shipments, with producers cutting prices in response.
The American side of the ledger
France’s argument has an American counterpart that is less often heard in European capitals, and it is in some ways the stronger one.
Unione Italiana Vini, drawing on research by WineAmerica, estimated that a 15 percent tariff on European wine imports would cost the United States upwards of 25 billion dollars, measured against a U.S. wine sector that contributes roughly 144.4 billion dollars to the American economy. The projection also anticipated a decline of about 3 billion dollars in sales of Italian, French, and Spanish wines and a further 13 percent fall in U.S. wine sales following three consecutive years of decline.
UIV President Lamberto Frescobaldi said the tariffs would cause a “far-reaching economic shock, particularly in the United States,” and urged negotiators to place wine on the zero-for-zero list of strategic products exempt from reciprocal tariffs. He said the association had received strong signals of support from American partners including the U.S. Wine Trade Alliance and importers.
The mechanism behind that claim is the structure of the American alcohol market. European wine and spirits reach U.S. consumers through a three-tier system of importers, distributors, and retailers, and the great majority of the value added to a bottle between the port and the table accrues to American businesses. A tariff on imported wine is therefore not principally a tax on French producers. It is a tax on American importers, who pay it at entry, and on the distributors, retailers, and restaurants whose margins are built on the landed cost.
That structure also explains why a tariff on wine behaves differently from a tariff on steel. There is no domestic substitute for Champagne or cognac. Appellation rules mean the products cannot be made anywhere else, which eliminates the import-substitution effect that justifies protective tariffs in other sectors. The duty raises revenue and raises prices, and it does not shift production to the United States, because production cannot shift.
Reactions and the politics of a carve-out
The Dublin meeting at which Forissier made his case was convened by the Irish presidency on Oct. 22 and 23, with the European Union’s trade ministers taking stock of relations with China as well as the transatlantic file. Canada participated on the margins, part of a broader European effort to deepen ties with partners outside the United States.
That context matters. The European Union has been pressing Washington to exempt roughly 150 billion euros of European goods from the Turnberry tariff structure, a far larger ask than a wine and spirits carve-out. Trade Commissioner Maros Sefcovic has consistently framed the European position as holding the United States to the 15 percent parameters agreed at Turnberry, including for tariffs arising from new investigations.
France’s narrower request is therefore both a tactical move and a test. If Washington grants it, the mechanism for expanding the most-favored-nation treatment list under the Joint Statement becomes real and other sectors will queue. If Washington declines while implementing the Irish whiskey exemption, the European Union faces an awkward internal question about why one member state’s product was lifted out of a common framework through a bilateral channel.
Irish officials, for their part, have reason to want the whiskey exemption implemented quickly and quietly. A carve-out secured at a golf resort is politically useful in Dublin and awkward in Brussels, and the longer the technical implementation takes, the more time there is for other member states to attach their own asks to it.
There has been no public response from USTR to Forissier’s request. The United States has not indicated that it is prepared to expand the Joint Statement’s exemption list, and the administration’s broader posture, which has leaned heavily on sectoral tariffs under Section 232 and Section 301, does not suggest an appetite for product-by-product liberalization.
Economic impact and what it means for trade flows
If the request were granted, the effect on trade flows would be meaningful but not transformative in the short run. Removing a 15 percent duty from a category where the most-favored-nation rate is zero would restore the pre-2025 status quo for European wine and spirits, which would support a recovery in volumes from a low base. It would not reverse the structural headwinds the sector faces: declining per capita alcohol consumption in the United States, generational shifts away from wine, and the loss of the Chinese cognac market to anti-dumping duties.
If the request is declined, the trajectory of the past three years is likely to continue. French export value has fallen 17 percent since 2022, U.S. sales fell 21 percent in 2025 alone, and FEVS has warned of a further volume correction. Producers have already responded with price cuts, which compress margins across a chain that includes thousands of small growers with limited capacity to absorb them.
For American businesses, the arithmetic is more immediate. Importers are paying the duty now, in cash, at entry. Distributors and retailers are carrying higher inventory costs. Restaurants, which depend heavily on wine margins, are absorbing cost increases in a demand environment that does not support corresponding price increases. The UIV estimate of a 25 billion dollar cost to the United States is a projection rather than a measurement, but the direction is not seriously disputed by the American trade.
The statutory tangle behind a single bottle
Part of what makes a wine and spirits carve-out difficult is that the duty a bottle pays today is the residue of four separate legal fights, three of which the administration lost.
The sequence began with the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. On Feb. 20, 2026, the Supreme Court held in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump that IEEPA does not authorize the President to impose tariffs. Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority, with Justices Kavanaugh, Thomas, and Alito dissenting. The Court did not address how duties already collected should be returned, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection has since been processing refunds at extraordinary scale. CBP reported collecting roughly 166 billion dollars in IEEPA duties; a filing dated Sept. 15, 2026 put accepted refund claims at about 134.7 billion dollars, with roughly 122 billion dollars including interest certified to Treasury across approximately 27.2 million entries.
The administration replaced IEEPA the same day the decision issued. Proclamation 11012 imposed a 10 percent worldwide surcharge under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, the balance-of-payments provision that permits such measures for up to 150 days. This is the measure that first put a duty on European spirits, which had entered the United States at a zero most-favored-nation rate. On May 7, 2026, a divided Court of International Trade held in State of Oregon v. United States that the surcharge exceeded the statute, finding that the trade and current account deficits relied upon were not the balance-of-payments deficits Section 122 contemplates. The Federal Circuit stayed that judgment on June 11, noting that the majority opinion may be incorrect. The surcharge expired on its own terms at 12:01 a.m. on July 24, 2026.
Section 301 took over the same day. New forced labor tariffs on goods from 60 economies took effect July 24, 2026 at rates of 10 or 12.5 percent, published at 91 Fed. Reg. 47318. Those tariffs are themselves being challenged in In re Section 301 Forced Labor Cases before the Court of International Trade, argued Sept. 30, 2026, with 25 states participating and no decision yet issued. A second Section 301 track covering structural excess capacity across 16 economies remains open.
The fourth strand is the oldest. The large civil aircraft dispute produced 25 percent tariffs on European and American spirits that were suspended from July 11, 2021 through July 11, 2026. That suspension, rather than a settlement, is why the spirits trade on both sides of the Atlantic continues to press for permanent removal.
The practical consequence for a French producer is that the 15 percent figure everyone cites is a ceiling assembled from instruments with different legal bases, different expiry dates, and different levels of litigation risk. A carve-out that addresses one strand does not necessarily address the others, which is why spiritsEUROPE framed its request in terms of the ceiling rather than any single measure.
How the trade is responding on both sides
The transatlantic drinks trade has spent two years building the habits of a sector that no longer assumes tariff stability.
European producers have diversified. The FEVS data show the pattern clearly: double-digit declines in the United States and China offset in part by growth in South Africa, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Australia. Picard pointed to the European Union’s agreements with India and the Mercosur bloc as the most promising structural development available to the sector, a notable reorientation for an industry whose premium categories were built on American and Chinese demand.
Price has been the other lever, and a costly one. Cognac producers cut prices in response to a 15.1 percent fall in global shipments, a response that protects volume at the expense of the margin structure that supports growers. Champagne export prices to the United States fell about 8 percent after a decade of steady increases, reversing a trend that had been one of the category’s defining features.
American importers have responded by compressing inventory and shortening planning horizons. Where a specialist importer once held twelve to eighteen months of cover on allocated products, several have moved toward just-in-time entry, accepting higher per-unit logistics costs in exchange for the option to delay a duty payment that might later be reduced or refunded. The IEEPA refund process, which returned duties to importers who had paid them under a statute later held invalid, has made that option look considerably more valuable than it did two years ago.
Retailers and restaurants have made the adjustments consumers can see. By-the-glass programs have shifted toward domestic and non-European imports, and premium European listings have thinned at the middle of the price range, where a 15 percent duty is most visible to the buyer and least absorbable by the operator.
Implications for importers and exporters
U.S. importers of European wine and spirits should treat the current regime as stable and plan around it, while positioning to act quickly if either the Irish implementation or a broader carve-out materializes. Six points are worth attention.
First, watch the Federal Register for the Irish whiskey implementing instrument. Whatever form it takes, whether a Harmonized Tariff Schedule modification, an annex amendment, or a new subheading, it will be the template for any subsequent carve-out. Importers of French, Italian, or Spanish products will want to understand its mechanics before arguing for inclusion.
Second, review classification carefully. Wine falls under heading 2204 and spirits under heading 2208, with substantial subheading detail that distinguishes sparkling from still, bulk from bottled, and grape brandy from other distillates. Where a tariff applies at the product level rather than the country level, classification determines liability, and a carve-out drafted around a product description will turn on the same distinctions.
Third, document origin rigorously, particularly for blends. Products assembled or blended across member states, or bottled in a country other than the one where the base product was made, can present origin questions that become decisive if exemptions are granted on a national basis. The Irish whiskey precedent is a national carve-out, and a French carve-out would be too.
Fourth, consider entry timing and bonded storage. If a carve-out is announced with an effective date, goods already entered for consumption will not benefit. Foreign trade zone admission and bonded warehousing preserve the option of entering goods after a favorable change takes effect, at the cost of carrying charges. For high-value, slow-moving inventory such as vintage Champagne and aged cognac, that calculation often favors deferral.
Fifth, revisit pricing and contract terms with European suppliers. Many agreements written in 2024 and 2025 allocated tariff risk on the assumption that rates would rise, not fall. Importers should ensure that a tariff reduction flows through to landed cost rather than being captured upstream, and that price lists can be revised on short notice in either direction.
Sixth, do not assume the 15 percent ceiling is a ceiling. spiritsEUROPE’s request that the United States keep tariffs from new Section 301 investigations within the agreed limit reflects a live concern that sectoral actions could stack. The Section 301 investigation into structural excess capacity across 16 economies, including the European Union, remains open with a statutory window running into March 2027, and no determination has been published.
For European exporters, the practical advice runs in the same direction. The companies best placed to benefit from any carve-out are those whose U.S. importers can act within days of an announcement, which means pre-positioned inventory, current price lists, and documentation ready to support a classification or origin claim. The Irish experience suggests that the gap between a presidential announcement and an enforceable tariff change can run to months, and that the announcement itself is not a basis for claiming relief at entry.
What to watch
Three things will determine whether Forissier’s campaign produces anything. The first is the Irish whiskey implementation, which will establish whether product carve-outs from the Turnberry framework are administratively feasible. The second is the next phase of European Union and United States talks on expanding the most-favored-nation treatment list, the mechanism the Joint Statement created and the one spiritsEUROPE has asked to be prioritized for spirits. The third is the Section 301 excess capacity determination, which could add to European tariff exposure rather than reduce it and would reframe the entire discussion.
Until then, French producers will keep asking, American importers will keep paying, and the 15 percent ceiling will remain exactly what Forissier called it: a useful limit, and not a conclusion.