A weekly(ish) notebook on the economics of food, drink, and place
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There's a wine shop near my house where you can buy two bottles of Chianti. One costs $11 and the other costs $18. Same grape. Same region. Same winemaking tradition. So what's the $7 difference?
Next PostApril 25, 2026 · Post #1
European wine exports to the United States fell 11% in January 2026. Italian wine got hit even harder. The numbers tell a story anyone paying attention already suspected, but there's more underneath the headline than meets the eye.
Read this post →April 25, 2026 · Post #1
European wine exports to the United States fell 11% in January 2026, down to about €1 billion, a loss of roughly €127 million compared to January a year earlier. Italian wine got hit even harder: exports dropped nearly 19% in value, with shipments to the U.S. cratering by more than a third. The European Commission's latest Agri-Food Trade Monitor released this week tells a story that anyone paying attention to the transatlantic wine trade already suspected was coming, but the numbers still sting.
I read reports like this differently than most people do. I don't just see a headline about declining global trade; I see a natural experiment — one that is messy and uncontrolled, playing out across thousands of decisions made by importers, distributors, restaurateurs, and consumers in real time. I see price signals, substitution effects, and information asymmetries tangled up with politics and tariff threats and the peculiarities of how wine moves across borders. I see, in other words, economics.
That's what this blog is about, mostly.
I'm an economist at the University of Tennessee at Martin, where I hold an endowed chair in free enterprise and entrepreneurship and direct something called the Economics and Business Innovation Lab. My research sits at the intersection of applied microeconomics, food and agriculture, and consumer behavior, which is a formal way of saying I study why people pay what they pay for the things they eat and drink, and what happens to markets when the rules change.
I also happen to care a good deal about wine. And beer. And cheese, and cured meats, and the way food systems are embedded in the places that produce them. Terroir for consumables. This isn't a hobby that runs parallel to my academic work — it is my academic work. I've published on how regional wine designations affect prices. I'm currently studying geographic price effects in numerous contexts, from price transmission for heritage meat products to ice cream tourism to the impact of concerts on travel. In a few weeks I'm heading to Belgium to visit lambic breweries and Trappist abbeys, and this fall I'm taking my family to Siena for a semester where I'll be teaching wine economics and food marketing while living inside one of the world's most storied food cultures. For the fourth time.
So when I read that European wine exports to the U.S. dropped by €127 million in a single month, I don't experience it as an abstraction. I think about the friendly winery producing Chianti in Siena and the long-standing, family-owned Vernaccia producer outside San Gimignano whose export strategies depend on the American market. I think about the importer in New York trying to decide whether to absorb a tariff or pass it through. I think about the consumer in Nashville staring at a shelf where the $14 Sangiovese she used to buy now costs $18, and whether she'll switch to something from Paso Robles instead.
Here's what makes the January 2026 numbers particularly interesting and particularly tricky to interpret. A big part of the year-on-year decline isn't really a decline at all. It's a hangover.
In early 2025, importers rushed to bring European wine into the U.S. ahead of anticipated tariffs. That front-loading inflated the January 2025 baseline. So when you compare January 2026 to that artificially high number, the drop looks more dramatic than the underlying demand shift probably warrants.
This is a classic problem in economic measurement: the comparison period matters enormously, and policy uncertainty doesn't just change behavior in the future. It changes behavior now, which distorts the data you'll use later to figure out what happened.
But strip away the base effect and there's still a real story here. Volumes to the U.S. fell 16%. Prices fell 19%. That combination of less wine moving at lower prices suggests something beyond a timing adjustment. It suggests that European wine is genuinely losing ground in the American market, at least at the margin. The question is whether that's a temporary response to trade policy noise or the beginning of a structural shift.
I have my own suspicions, but I'll save those for future posts. What I will say is this: wine is one of the most interesting products in all of economics. It lies on the border between experience and credence goods. Like all experience goods, you can't fully evaluate it until you consume it. But for many, it also fits the mold of a traditional credence good, where much of what you're paying for (terroir, tradition, regulatory compliance) you have to take on faith. It's wrapped in layers of geographic branding, cultural signaling, and regulatory architecture that vary enormously across countries. And it's subject to trade policy decisions made by people who, in many cases, don't drink it or understand the preferences of those who do.
I'm calling this blog Marginal Indulgence because it captures exactly where I exist, professionally and otherwise. In economics, "marginal" means the next unit (the next dollar, the next bottle, the next decision at the edge). That's where the interesting action happens, not in grand theory but in the small choices that aggregate into markets. And "indulgence" is the subject matter: wine, food, beer, cheese, the things we consume not just for sustenance but for pleasure, for culture, for identity. It is at the margin where a Barbaresco differs from a Barolo, where a farmstead cheese becomes an artisan product, where a small-town brewery decides whether to distribute beyond the county line.
Expect short posts — maybe 800 words, maybe fewer — about the economics of food, drink, and place. I'll write about wine, obviously, but also beer, regional food systems, geographic indications, entrepreneurship, and whatever catches my attention at the grocery store, in a trattoria, or in a dataset. Some posts will connect to my published research. Some will be dispatches from the field — Belgium this spring, Siena this fall. Some will just be me thinking out loud about why a gelato costs what it costs in Florence versus Siena, or what happens to a rural Tennessee county when its only grocery store aside from Wal-Mart closes.
I'll try to write the way I wish more economists would: clearly, without jargon, and about things that actually matter to people who eat. Which is everyone.
Welcome to the indulgence.