One hundred thousand bottles of wine and champagne were sitting in the French port of Le Havre waiting to be loaded onto a cargo ship for New York when an urgent call came in to stop the shipment.
Anthony Moses and his team at Twins, the biggest importer of Bordeaux wine into the US, got the warning from lobbyists in Washington that Trump’s proposed 200 per cent tariff on all alcohol from France and other European Union countries could be applied to this shipment worth $5 million.
Two days later, the advice changed: the tariff deadline had moved, and the team now needed to get the bottles across the Atlantic as swiftly as possible.
“It’s like playing ‘red light, green light’ in Squid Game,”