Oh Canada, Hero Donald crashing, the economic recession looming.
What happens next? Watch what happens will happen right here.
On fifty five KRC, the talkstation.
At six fifty five air CD talk station lighting things up on a Wednesday, which is always a wonderful thing to do. We'll get We'll hear from Judge Anabolatan at the bottom of the r as we always do every Wednesday on the fifty five Krcy Warns Show. We will hear from Rebecca Cerndorff, Ohioans for Child Protections got a horrific story about a child molester who was a priest and he wants some lenien C now that he's getting out of prison. He doesn't want to register as a
sex offender or something. So I got two words for him. And it ain't happy birthday as Dad used to say. But I am pleased to welcome back into the fifty five KRC Morning Show studios. Keegan Corcoran from Ignition Wines. He is a wholesale wine distributor. If you are a wine business and you want to buy, go to Keegan ignitionwines dot com. If you're a restaurant and you want to buy go to ignitionwines dot com. He is one of the high level samers on the planet. He's just
one step below the highest tier you can get. Good to see again, Keegan, you brought a friend with you from Avenia Wines located in Washington State, Thomas Woodley. Thomas, this was really fun talking with you off Aaron, and I'm glad to have you in the studio today.
Yeah, thanks for having me. It's always good to be back in Cincinnati.
Now, if I was able to drink in studio, I would tell my listeners that you make a fantastic wine called Lydion, which is a white blend of Sauvignon blanc and semeon. Is that if I got that right? Yeah, got it right, But Chris, wonderful refreshing Again, if I could drink it, I would know that that is the case with the wine. But I'll have to wait till after the show's over to figure that out on my own.
But we'll talk a little bit more about wine. But the reason we have Keegan and Thomas and studio is to talk about what is actually really far more complicated than I was boiling it down to the proposed tariffs on wines, imported wines. Now, Donald Trump announced at one point he was going to be a two hundred percent tariffs. Now was it on all imported wines Spain and you know, yeah from Okay? Correct, Yeah, European Union wine blanket tariff
two hundred percent okay. And the motivation for that, as you explained to me, is their tariff on imported whiskey from America.
Yeah, fifty percent I think was the retaliation for So it was kind of a response to that, particularly Bourbon, which you know, our proximity to Bourbon country is you know, we we don't want to feel the affects home too much.
So I can understand a lot of people that can bourbon.
To Americans and most notedly by friends of Kentucky, although I know you can make it elsewhere. That's like champagne, and the name champagne is to French. If it ain't grown in the Champagne region, it's not champagne to be bubbly, sparkling wine. But you can't call it champagne, can do. They even make bourbon in France, not in France. They make it in other parts of the United States. But no, no, no,
I'm talking about they can't get our bourbon. They have been posed, correct, you eve imposed attacks on something that a lot of French people might want, but it comes at a much higher cost to the French people. It's deprived them of a very wonderful option in terms of spirit or of the gods man, of course, especially if you get the right kind of bourbon. I've become a Bourbon fan of the last several years. I was always Scotch McCallum, mcalum mcalumccowen. But any event, now Thomas and Keegan.
My initial reaction was, well, if the tariffs go through right or wrong, and I'm not a tariff guy, but if it's fifty percent, I can at least arguably justify a fifty percent tax on the imported wines. Going to afrom with a sledgehammer and saying two hundred percent seems arbitrary, And of course it's a divisive thing, and it creates division between our country and the European Union.
We can't we don't need any more of that given the current climate.
But I thought, well, won't that be good for domestic wine producers such as yourself with a viney wines. But there's it's more complicated than that I found out. Thomas explained that it.
Is a bit so so a pretty like US, which is a like I would say, you know, a mid cap producer in Washington State, we do about twelve thousand cases a year.
Okay, give you give you.
A ballpark of what that looks like at any one time. Back in the day, Chachel Sam Michelle, which is the biggest winery in Washington State has been for years, had a standing order where they had to have I think a million cases of Chardonnay ready to bottle at any given time.
Holy cow.
Yeah, So it's it's we're small.
We're small, right.
So the distributors that we deal.
With in in in the in the US, we work with twenty three different distributors. After the repeal of Prohibition three cheer system came out Nickel Tour is that if you do any interstate business, you have to appoint a distributor within that state to carry your wines if you're not from that state. Okay, So legally I can distribute
my own wine within Washington State. We happen to have a distributor, but there's no law preventing me from just doing direct any distributor that I deal with, I'm trying to think if there's any that don't have some sort of import exposure.
Basically all of them.
Do, right, Because so if you're like keyan ignitionwines dot com, you're buying wines from Washington State, you know, from California, but you're also buying them from South America or Spain or Portugal or France, Italy. Correct, So their bottom line is impacted because of these tariffs. Now they may have a huge selection offerings of domestic wine, but their business is contingent also upon import of wines.
Yeah, and the health of their businesses. Right, So if the tariffs, the first blush is that the I guess the knee jerk reaction to the two hundred percent tariffs is like, well, this is going to benefit domestic wine, and maybe in the short term it would. We're starting to see bits of pickup where distributors that have significant import exposure, which is kind of what it is at this point, have started to beef up.
On their inventories of domestic wine.
But the problem is for the loading up in advance of the terror, loading up in advance.
Doing it cautiously and doing it mindfully, but that But what ends up happening is is all that that money that's going to eventually pay me is gonna is gonna dwindle because it's reliant upon import wines. So all the money comes out of the same, the same bowl I get you. So and if there's not money in that bowl,
then they can't buy my wine. So they need they need the import business as a measure of keeping their lights on and doing and doing, you know, keeping their revenues where they need to be in order to be a properly functioning company.
In terms of business operation. Now there's a little wine store up the street from us. I like to support them. The tough couple of terrific guys run and they're always making great selections and great recommendations. They do not raise the price of the wine they've already acquired if the
new acquisition cost has gone up. So if my favorite wine, Dulce, at one point it was still sitting on the shelves at seventy five dollars for the three hundred and fifty millli liter bottle, and I had seen it at other stores for one hundred and ten or twenty. The price has gone up, sure, And I asked them about that. I said, well, you aren't jacking the price up on that adults. She said, no, we got it at a certain cost, and we have our margins and we're happy
to just let it go until it's sold. And when we buy new wine, we'll have to raise the price because we have new acquisition costs. Is that typically what most wholesalers or but most retailers do.
Yeah, So it would start with the winery.
So on this what we call the supplier side, which is any winery supplying a distributor who eventually sells the product to restaurants or bottle shops or whatever.
You establish a price with with a given vintage.
So, for example, the one of the wines that we're tasting today is the twenty twenty.
Three Spo theoretically tasting.
Theoretically tasting, yeah, sniffing well, hypothetically tasting at the end of the show, whenever you want to do it.
We set the price.
We set the price every year to our distributors, and we say this is going to cost you this much a case.
It generally isn't a.
Great idea to jerk around your prices.
Kind of figure out your cost of good sold on the winery level, and you say, okay, let's hold this price. But when there would be a price change would be a new vintage follows. So sure, with the twenty twenty four, let's say that fruit costs more or whatever, the price might go up modestly, but generally you try to really avoid large swings in prices to your wholesalers because that puts them in a bad spot and it kind of makes the winery look greedy.
So avoid that.
And there's an issue right now what they say they call the premium these premiumization of wine right now, where a lot of these wineries, particularly some of the higher ends, more classic producers and whatnot, they're prices of skyrocketed, increased exponentially, and.
Just because of the name and the quality. Yeah, it's just an interesting trend. I mean, there's multiple factors as to like why that's happening. But then we're seeing a die off on some of the sub ten dollars you know, cost bottles a lot, and so like it's actually a little bit better because it's driving the consumer to you know, the more you know, ten to twenty dollars bottle of wines or twenty to thirty bottle, you know, dollar bottle of wines.
So in some respects that good. That's good.
But for you know, for your case, for Dulce Man, that's uh oh, it's insane.
Yeah, well that that's why the bottle.
I got two bottles, and I know where I got them, and there's still a land on their side. I haven't opened them because it's got to be a damn special occasion for me to crack a bottle of north of one hundred dollars bottle, a hundred doll of wine. Sure, I still have that the gift that I got that chateau moved on Rothschild. Oh yeah, it was a gift from a deer, a very very nice lady, Linda. Thank
you so much for that. But you know, I'm gonna need something, uber outrageously a special occasion to open that thing, because I found out how much that bottle's worth, Lord Almighty. And see I'm not even a cab guy that much. So anyhow, we'll pause, we'll bring it back. We'll talk a little bit more about tariffs and the realities. Though it's eight sixteen right now. If you have Karcity Talk station, don't go.
This is fifty five KRC and iHeartRadio station Andy.
Andy, Hi, there's your nine first forecast. Channel Line says today a sun and cloud mix with the little spotty rain possible fifty two for the high down to thirty five overnight, maybe patsy frost, clear skies. Game day four ten, first pitch, We're gonna have clouds increasing throughout the day, maybe a little scattered rain showing up around two, high a fifty eight, and then around eight there's gonna be steady rain showing up in the area, which is supposed
to last overnight. Lee says what the forecast says over night forty nine, start with rain tomorrow morning and or Friday morning. We'll go up to seventy seven thirty five degrees. Right now, it's time for a traffic update.
Chuck from the.
UC up Triumphon Center. For National Doctors Day, we honor the UC health physicians who are leading breakthroughs for better Tomorrow's learn more at you see how dot com North Bend seventy five continues to run over a fifteen minute delay between Burlington Piking Downtown in Bend seventy four slows to Montana found four seventy one break mites off and on after you get pastscranmed and slow traffic. E's found two seventy five between Coleraine and Hamilton Avenue into the fog.
Chuck Ingram on fifty five Tara scene the talk station.
Because he just got popped for I know, say eight nineteen fifty about here see talk station talking off air, talking on air, talking with Thomas Woodley.
From Avennio Wines.
They make an outstanding wine at Washington State and we've got them in studio along with Keegan Corcoran from Ignition Wines, the wholesale distributor of wines, including of Vennyo Wines. Because we're talking tariffs now, this this creates some some logistical business issues for the the the purchasers the acquired the whole, the distributors of wine because now they got to pay.
The crapshoot game of wondering whether Donald Trump's really going to actually implement it or this is just one of those. We need to get the French to fill in the blank. We need to get the Italians of the European Union generally speaking, to do something we want, like get rid of the whiskey tariff or maybe go ahead and take
over the fighting in Ukraine. I don't know, but if he gets something that will justify him taking this threat off the books, that doesn't unring the bell that many distributors have already rung by acquiring a bunch of soon to be more expensive imported wines. Correct, they sink a lot of money into this, they.
Certainly do, And there's some distributors that have even gone so far as to stock up on two years worth of supply in anticipation of this. I think a lot of us are hoping that, you know, the tariffs and the threats thereof are just a device, as we were talking about a second ago of hopefully bringing somebody to the negotiation table and or you know, resending previously levied tariffs.
But that said, you still have a lot of people that are tying up their capital so they have less operating money to work off here in the United States. And the way it works typically is, or not typically how it works is you know, for for me, I have standing orders in Italy, Spain and France that are on indefinite hold that that means you paid for it already, not yet, okay, but you got I served ten cases of UFKLCO and it's they've they've allocated you that you
just need to buy it and pick it up. And that's the problem, correct, Yeah, but you don't know when the tariff's going to kick in. Right, So if if I were to place that order, i'd pay for it.
It would be shipped, and let's say, you know, but I'm avoiding that or trying to avoid having that wine be you know, on a shipping on a vessel in the Atlantic, and then these tariffs hit and then once it lands the United States, I have to pay two hundred percent to the General Fund for the Treasury effectively of the United States, just to get my own property back.
Okay, So it's like a flight to uh to to take illegal immigrants out of the country, and it's already on the way and you can't turn it. You can't turn it around. Now, you can't turn it around. I'm just trying to draw humorous parallel if what Trump did. Yeah, it's too late to turn it around in spite of the court order. So well, right, that means when it lands on our shore, you're gonna have to pay the two hundred percent TERRIFFRCT but maybe not because you don't
know the specifics of how that's going to work. There's a whole lot of uncertainty built into this, right.
Which, as we all know, you know, uncertainty is never a good word that this operations with. You know, it's like and and and one of my favorite you know sayings, and I guess adages, you know, hope is not a plan. So it's it's so I can't I can't be like, well, you know, I'm gonna place this order and hope that
this doesn't go through. And and and there's a lot of a lot of other distributors that are in the same mind frame that it's like, okay, we we can't take you know, this gargantuan risk of putting all this money, some of which I mean and in the wine game, I mean it sounds glamorous. And and even on the restaurant side too, you know, it's it's it's the profit margins are are not as grand as a lot of people think. So so just like with any business of any size, you have to, you know, stay on top
of your your working capital. You have to stay on top of all of your expenses to make sure that you can keep the lights on and the the particularly European wines of the world are a big part of a lot of distributors portfolios that allow them access to, you know, other restaurants and other bars and whatnot.
See.
And that's the business element that that's very complicating to someone who doesn't is engaged in it. If you want to get into a relationship, a long standing relationship with say a Jeff Ruby's where you used to be the prosoma for more than a decade, you could better have a good broad availability. You better have French wines, you better have Spanish wines, you better have South America or Australian wines.
You got to have it all, yep.
Yeah, now, And in to Keegan's point, you know that at the end of the day, with with whether the teriffs come through or not, and certainty, it certainly affects the wholesaler business. But we're we're really, we're the rubber really meets the road is in terms of what consumers have available to them, right, yeah, and and and and whether you for domestic wines to import wines. The whole swath is healthier when there's certainty and tariffs are fine,
you know, but it would be, but it benefits. The ultimate beneficiary to having a healthy wine market is the end consumer. Yeah, because prices stay down, choice stays up, and the playing field is as even as it can be.
Yeah, and that's what we're all I think hoping for, is just even the playing field. You know why in the hell? For examples, British Columbia have been imposing a heavy levey on domestically produced wines. Well because British Columbia has its own vennors, its own wineries, and they're trying to protect that turf to the detriment of the British Columbians who are deprived of choices of wines because they're so damn expensive getting them in from the United States. So it's just bad for everybody.
Guys.
It has been wonderful Thomas Woodley from of any of wines, which also makes another I hear outstanding wins, which is the Columbia Valley rose a blend. Let's keep I can get this right. Seventy five percent and twenty five percent. I learned a new word today.
Nice well moved. Yeah, I mean that's the American Washingtonian slang for maved. But yeah, both Grenache and maved are traditional ritals grown from the southern.
Rhwan region in France.
But we really and and a lot of times they're both used for still red wines and for rose. We love we we vinify this. H we make a I should say, a still red wine version of grenash. We work with some grenache, but it's terrific for rose. Its pizza too, yeah, it is.
You know what.
A shout out to Wayfarer Tavern. Keegan brought me a Wayfairer Tavern pizza and it is awesome. Gentlemen, It's been a really fun conversation today, Thomas, A pleasure to meet you. Congratulations on the success for your winery. Again, I'd look forward out there of any wines wholesale distributed by Ignition Wines, which you can find a lot of ignition wise dot com. You get free clogs for you, Keegan, my dear friend. You know I love you and I love your mom, Claenn hang out.
You know your mom and.
Dad, Clara and Jeff. You guys out there, Uh good. I can't thank you enough for bringing Keegan into this world. It's been a great time. I look forward to having you in again. And you know Thomas. If you're ever in the area, you're always welcome to come on in and talk wine during the morning.
Sure, I appreciate it.
Thanks for having me, folks.
It is Wednesday, Judge Enda Polaitano waiting in the wings. Today we're talking history of free speech, going back to the very important Brandenburg case. You might not want to hear it, but you're allowed to say it.
Judge Enda Polaitano up next, fifty five KR