Addressing Tariff and Non-Tariff Barriers (NTBs)

Wine is often caught up in wider trade disputes that have little or nothing to do with the sector itself. FIVS works with governments and industry partners to advocate for wine to be excluded from retaliatory tariffs and other trade measures, highlighting the costs they impose on producers, businesses and consumers. We make the case that wine is a uniquely place- based product, with supply chains and markets that cannot simply be relocated to avoid tariffs. By keeping wine out of unrelated trade disputes, FIVS helps protect consumer choice, limit unnecessary disruption and ensure that wine can continue to move freely between
markets.

Find out more in FIVS Press Release: FIVS “The Voice of Wine” calls on governments to keep wine out of trade disputes that have nothing to do with our sector. Tariffs benefit no-one (March 31, 2025)
 

FIVS actively monitors emerging regulations and engages with governments to prevent unnecessary technical barriers from disrupting international wine trade. Our advocacy is grounded in FIVS principles and technical papers, including our Good Regulatory Principles and E-Labelling Principles, which promote science-based, proportionate and internationally aligned regulation. We raise concerns through the WTO TBT notification process, EU regulatory consultation mechanisms and direct engagement with governments, providing evidence-based comments on proposed measures and drawing attention to disproportionate requirements, practical challenges for producers and risks of regulatory fragmentation.

Recent interventions on proposed labelling requirements in Spain and Thailand illustrate this work. In both cases, FIVS’s concerns were heard as part of wider engagement by governments and stakeholders. Through these interventions, we help ensure that the wine sector’s concerns are considered and contribute to a more coherent, predictable and internationally aligned regulatory environment.

For years, wine exporters navigating Asia Pacific markets faced a maze of inconsistent documentation and repetitive certifications.

The Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Wine Regulatory Forum (APEC WRF) was an eight-year public private partnership between the 21 Asian Pacific governments and wine industry—heavily influenced by FIVS and its members— that ended in 2018, but its outputs continue to positively impact the global wine trade.

The APEC Model Wine Certificate was a key output of the APEC WRF that continues to be used by governments and industry in the region.

The purpose of this certificate is to help streamline the process for wine exports to the APEC region by consolidating existing certificate requirements into a single certificate usable across the region. The APEC Model Wine Certificate is a multi-purpose certificate used for Certificates of Authenticity/Free Sale, Certificates of Health/Sanitation, and Certificates of Origin.  It remains a clear example of the kind of pragmatic, science based policy outcomes that FIVS has long championed.

The WRF sought to educated government regulators about the low risk profile of wine and science was a decisive factor in securing regulatory support.  The paper “Microbiologically, wine is a low food safety risk consumer product[JF1] ”, to which several FIVS members  contributed, demonstrated that wine about 7% ABV has inherent characteristics (alcohol, high acidity, and other natural components) that make wine a consumer product with a low microbiological safety risk- enabling regulators to shift scarce government resources away from unnecessary wine testing and towards higher risk food categories.