This is an edited transcript of my conversation on August 5 with Michael Kaiser, the new executive director of WineAmerica. We discussed WineAmerica’s recent achievements in Washington on behalf of the country’s wineries, efforts against the anti-alcohol movement, and Michael’s reflections on tariffs and the need to secure disaster relief funding for wineries facing the vagaries of weather and wildfires.
Dave McIntyre 00:00
Hello, everyone! My name is Dave McIntyre and welcome to WineLine Live, a five o’clock happy hour edition. I am pleased today to welcome Michael Kaiser, a dear old friend of mine and supporter of local wines back when we had an organization called Drink Local Wine that promoted the idea of wine from around here, wherever here happens to be. So thank you for joining us. Michael is here today in his capacity as the Executive Director of WineAmerica, a national trade association representing American wineries. Michael, welcome.
Michael Kaiser 00:00
Hi, Dave. Thanks for having me. The first Drink Local Wine event I went to was in Colorado, in 2012. In my position, I’ve been lucky enough to have wine from almost every state, but that was great to see like-minded people — local food was a thing, so why wasn’t local wine a thing? I think that’s something that, through my work with WineAmerica, became a passion — just kind of a natural progression.
Dave McIntyre 00:00
I think the situation of local food but not local wine has gotten a little better, but there’s still a lot of work to do in a lot of places — so we can keep the message going. Michael, please tell us a little about yourself, how you came to work for WineAmerica. You’re not new with the organization; you’ve been there for quite some time, and I’d like to know how you came to that position, then we can talk about the organization itself.
Michael Kaiser 00:38
Yeah. So, I was born and raised — not to go too far back — in New Jersey, and I moved down to Washington, D.C. like so many people did, to go to graduate school. That was 1999, so I’ve been in D.C. longer than I was in New Jersey. I’m a D.C. native, I’d say now. I live by what’s going to be the new RFK Stadium — the old RFK Stadium — with my wife and two sons, 17 and 14. I went to American University and graduated with a master’s there. I worked for a couple of lobbying firms doing legislative tracking, research, and bill tracking. In 2006 I was actually working as a tour guide here in D.C. on Segways — I don’t know if those are still a thing, but I did that for a summer. I had an agency searching for a more permanent job for me, and they said, “Hey, there’s this winery trade association that needs someone to handle regulatory affairs.” The alcohol industry is regulated through the Treasury Department, primarily through the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau — a bureau within Treasury — and there’s a bunch of rules and regulations that all alcohol producers have to follow. They needed someone to interface with them. I didn’t know anything about wine, but I took the job. That was July of 2006 — so, do the math, it’s 20 years and one month with the organization. Over the last 20 years I’ve done a lot of different things with the organization — primarily, for the last 12 years, our legislative affairs and lobbying work, which I’m still doing in my current job. Then this May I was made executive director and given the reins to head the trade association — about a week and a half ago, actually; it was announced on Tuesday last week. At the end of July, our outgoing president, Jim Trezise, who’d been with the organization a long time and was also head of the New York Wine and Grape Foundation, stepped away from WineAmerica. He’s still very active in the industry, and I’m excited to see what he does next. That’s kind of how we got to where I am right now. So — what is WineAmerica?
Dave McIntyre 04:09
Before you get into that, let me add a little context — I used to work for a regulatory agency, and people who aren’t in Washington maybe don’t live and breathe this stuff. Every industry has regulations that affect it, local, state, and federal. But alcohol, because of our history with Prohibition, has particularly strange regulations, so it’s important to have representation here in Washington. With that context, tell us what WineAmerica is, what it does for wineries, and the benefits consumers get from your work.
Michael Kaiser 05:05
Yeah, that’s a good point. Alcohol is unique in that we have 50 states — 52 counting D.C. and territories — plus the federal government, each setting their own rules and regulations. From a federal standpoint, every wine label has to be approved by the TTB before it can go to market, and there are federal excise taxes that producers need to pay. To answer your question — what does WineAmerica do? We’re a nonprofit trade association, a 501(c)(6), which means we’re allowed to do advocacy. If you’re a winery in the United States with a federal basic permit, you can belong to our organization. Dues go from $500 up, way up, and what that gets you is representation here in D.C. from a government affairs standpoint. If there’s an issue that would impact your business, adversely or positively, we work on the wineries’ behalf — it could be a tax break, or money for research into new grape varieties, or pest management, like trying to stop the spotted lanternfly. We represent wineries from across the country, but our bread and butter is wineries outside of California, because California wineries also have the Wine Institute, a California-only trade association that also has a presence here.
How does this impact the wine consumer? If taxes were to go up on wine, producers might have to raise prices, so the consumer would pay more for their favorite wines — if we can help prevent that, that’s how our work gets down to the consumer. Another example is grape research: wineries are always trying to figure out what they can grow, and that has a trickle-down effect. As a value-added agricultural product, the work we do is important, and it benefits not just the producers but the people who consume that product.
Dave McIntyre 08:46
I want to welcome everybody who’s joined us, and remind everyone you’re watching Dave McIntyre’s WineLine Live with Michael Kaiser, executive director of WineAmerica, the national trade association representing U.S. wineries. Now, about the Wine Institute — that name might be more familiar to a lot of people. They represent wineries in California, and a lot of what they do may benefit wineries elsewhere, but those interests aren’t always exactly the same, and wineries elsewhere have other concerns.
Michael Kaiser 09:40
That’s right. We’re at the point now where the industry has grown so much in the last 20 years that almost every state has its own trade association for wineries — there’s the Washington Wine Institute, the Oregon Winegrowers Association, the Texas Wine and Grape Growers Association, all doing work in Olympia, Austin, and other state capitals. But the Wine Institute is unique in that they work in Sacramento, but also here in D.C. and across the country. There’s a lot of overlap with issues important to the entire industry, but each state has different things important to it. As an example, wineries here in our region — Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, the Mid-Atlantic — had that devastating frost in April that’s going to hinder so many wineries this year with the ‘26 vintage. One of the things we’re doing currently is trying to get them some disaster funding. There’s not really much of a frost issue for grapes in California.
Dave McIntyre 11:02
I was just attending some events in Maryland — the Maryland Wineries Association and the state Department of Agriculture were honoring six of their pioneering wineries from the ‘70s and ‘80s that laid the foundation for the state industry’s growth. They’re estimating that the April 21 freeze will cost Maryland wineries about $14 million in lost retail sales this year, with ramifications felt for years beyond that. There were some dire early assessments about vine kill — people are now realizing maybe it’s not so bad, but the effect on the 2026 vintage is overwhelming. They also talked about state laws that had to change to allow wineries to pour samples for visitors, sell a glass of wine, or have tables and chairs for people to sit at when they visit a tasting room — those weren’t allowed in the beginning. So that’s the network of regulations wineries have to deal with. Those were pretty formidable, probably because nobody was thinking about wineries when the regulations were devised years and years ago. So wineries had to come in and say, “We’re doing something new, we need this changed” — and WineAmerica is that voice on the national stage, right?
Michael Kaiser 13:14
Maryland’s a good example of a state that’s grown but also had to deal with a lot of those antiquated rules. They’ve been lucky — their former executive director of the wineries association is now the secretary of agriculture there, so he understands the industry. I think he was the first person representing value-added agriculture appointed to that position, so he’s got a unique perspective. That just shows the overall value of trade associations — at the state level and the federal level. But the problem trade associations will always face is that the work we do benefits the entire industry, not just the people who belong. That’s a sacrifice those of us who work for trade associations make — we believe in what we’re doing, we believe in the industry. But not everybody’s going to pony up the money to belong, and I get it — particularly right now, when people are trying to cut costs, and the first thing to go is often the association dues.
Dave McIntyre 16:01
Well, how many members does WineAmerica have currently?
Michael Kaiser 16:07
Yeah, right now it’s around 400. It’s not what it needs to be, but one of the things that’s been good for us is that we also have an association membership. The Maryland Wineries Association, for example, is also a member of WineAmerica — that doesn’t mean their individual members are also members of ours, but the association memberships are what really give us national reach. The Wine Institute is a member too, and that’s really our grassroots network. When we’re working on an issue and trying to get something passed, we tell the state associations, and that way we can mobilize hundreds, if not thousands, of wineries.
Dave McIntyre 16:57
It’s like an old-fashioned phone tree. Let’s look back a bit on some of the accomplishments of WineAmerica over the past several years — what you’ve worked on and the changes you’ve been able to get through Congress or the TTB. What are some of those?
Michael Kaiser 17:29
I think the biggest thing we got done in years with the organization was the Craft Beverage Modernization and Tax Reform Act — it’s a mouthful, but it was a comprehensive bill that created a bunch of tax breaks for the alcohol industry, finalized and made permanent in 2020. We started working on that in 2015. By the end of 2017, as so often happens in D.C., we got a two-year version of the bill. Before that there was what was known as the small producer tax credit, a carve-out for small producers to pay a lower excise tax on wine — in the wine industry we’re taxed just for the fact that we produce something. You pay a tax basically because you’re producing it. But —
Dave McIntyre 18:39
— and small producers are, I imagine, the vast majority of who you represent, because anything outside of California, New York, Oregon, and Washington is probably going to be a small producer.
Michael Kaiser 18:55
Yeah, of the roughly 10,000 wineries in the country, you could say 9,000, maybe 9,500, are small producers — there are obviously a couple of big ones. The difference is between paying $1.07 a gallon versus seven cents on the wine you produce. This bill got rid of the small producer credit and expanded the credit for everybody — not just wine, but beer and spirits too, since we all pay different excise tax rates; spirits pay the highest, beer the lowest.
That was 2017, and then two years later, in ‘19, we got a one-year extension, taking us to 2020. We all know what happened in 2020 — with COVID, tasting rooms got shut down, and a lot of wineries pivoted to direct-to-consumer sales, whether shipping or, in cases like Maryland and Virginia, local delivery under special exemptions. Wineries needed this tax break to continue. So at the end of 2020 we got it into one of those big omnibus bills that gets done at the end of every year, and it was made permanent. The wrinkle was that this was right around Christmas, and we expected the president to sign it — he said he wasn’t going to. There was a threat of a government shutdown, so there was a stretch of about three days where we thought it wasn’t going to go through. In the end he did sign it, and that —
Dave McIntyre 21:11
— that’s something that happens in Washington. It’s part of a big omnibus bill, and someone can put up an objection to something in the bill — and all the small policy wrapped up in it can suffer or get blocked for something that has nothing to do with the merits of the argument itself. And that’s —
Michael Kaiser 21:35
— to illustrate that even further: we had close to 80 senators and over 300 members of the House on this bill, bipartisan. You’d think with that kind of support it would’ve been passed and signed into law on its own, but issues like this always get folded, as you said, into larger things that have nothing to do with them.
I’d say that was probably the single most important and significant thing I personally worked on for the organization, and it came at the right time. Getting that made permanent in 2020/21 meant mid-size producers wouldn’t see thousands of dollars in tax increases, which would have been detrimental.
Some of the other issues we’re always working on are agriculture issues — trying to get money for research and pest management. The spotted lanternfly is a big problem here on the East Coast, and now it’s becoming a California problem too.
One of the newer things we’ve had to work on is pushing back on what I’d call a neo-prohibitionist narrative that’s out there now — a direct threat to our industry. People drink alcohol for enjoyment, and people have been consuming alcohol moderately for thousands of years — that’s the vast majority of consumers — but now, all of a sudden, it’s become a big negative issue.
A great way to illustrate how this crept into federal policy: every five years there’s what’s known as the Dietary Guidelines for Americans — R.F.K. Jr. had a big role in this with his new food pyramid — basically the government recommending what you should and shouldn’t eat, and how much. It’s done jointly by the USDA and Health and Human Services. Alcohol had been in the guidelines for a long time, with recommendations that if you do drink, a man can safely consume two drinks a day and a woman one, where a “drink” was defined as a 12-ounce beer around 5% alcohol, a five-ounce glass of wine at 12–13%, or 1.5 ounces of spirits. For many years that’s what was considered safe consumption. Make no mistake — the guidelines weren’t pro-alcohol, and they weren’t recommending people drink two drinks a day; they were saying if you do consume, don’t have 14 drinks in one sitting.
It also said certain people shouldn’t drink at all — there are obvious health risks. That’s how it was for many years, including the last edition, from 2020 to 2025. The process works like this: Congress authorizes and funds certain studies. What was authorized through Congress was a study by NASEM — the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine — where experts studied the health outcomes of alcohol consumption. The Biden administration also had HHS do a separate study, for the first time not authorized by Congress, through the Interagency Coordinating Committee for the Prevention of Underage Drinking, or ICCPUD. We all want to prevent underage drinking, but that’s completely unrelated to health outcomes, and the people contracted to do that study were critical of any alcohol consumption. NASEM looked at actual health outcomes; ICCPUD looked at societal outcomes too — drunk driving, domestic violence, anything bad that could come from overconsumption — not just health outcomes.
We said, this isn’t how the process is supposed to work — Congress approved the NASEM study, not the ICCPUD study, so this was out of the ordinary, and we didn’t want to see the ICCPUD study used to formulate the guidelines. In the end, USDA and HHS decided to use only the NASEM study. The two studies had very different findings — both said there’s an increased risk of certain cancers if you consume alcohol, but the NASEM study also found lower all-cause mortality among moderate drinkers, meaning they tend to live longer, which may be tied to diet and activity level. The ICCPUD study, paraphrasing, suggested any alcohol consumption raises your risk significantly. Both agreed that if you don’t drink, you shouldn’t start.
What did change in the new guidelines, which we did not advocate for, was that they got rid of the two-drinks/one-drink guidance, and now the guidelines just say “consume responsibly.” It was kind of a blessing and a curse for us to be in there — you wanted to be there to say what you could safely consume, but if we’d been removed entirely, that would’ve looked bad for the industry.
Dave McIntyre 29:40
This again seems like a Washington story — it’s an important issue, and you and the other organizations lobbying on behalf of consumers and producers focused your opposition on process, saying this isn’t the way to go about it. And you were effective. But for me, this whole issue — you mentioned drunk driving and underage drinking — we litigated all that years and years ago, with Mothers Against Drunk Driving. The message was: consume, but don’t drink and drive, don’t operate a forklift, as we read on the back label, don’t drink when you’re pregnant, don’t get drunk at the office Christmas party and make a fool of yourself, don’t take advantage of other people if you lose control. That’s a message of responsible consumption, and that’s changed with this new prohibitionism — I’ll call them neo-prohibitionists. The argument now is that there’s no safe level of consumption, that a sip of Riesling is going to give me cancer or increase my chance of getting it. If you look at the numbers, that’s not really the case. Just today the Washington Post had a column by their brain-health columnist promoting the argument of no safe level of consumption. The political message is changing, and that worries me both as a policy matter and as a wine lover. It’s moving away from “know your limits and consume responsibly” toward “don’t drink at all.”
Michael Kaiser 33:04
Yeah, a couple of things you touched on I want to comment on. What I’d call the neo-prohibitionist, anti-alcohol crowd — whatever you want to call it — lumps all alcohol consumption into one big monolith, as if having a glass of wine is the same as someone having five vodka tonics in one sitting, or having one beer at a baseball game is the same as someone drinking a six-pack or a twelve-pack every night. The vast majority of people do it moderately, and that’s what we encourage, not just for health reasons but for societal ones. They also lump all alcohol producers together, so a tiny winery in Maryland or Pennsylvania gets equated with “Big Alcohol” — “Big Alcohol killed the dietary guidelines” is basically the narrative. But you’re right, it wasn’t about the outcome, it was about the process — we’d have dealt with whatever the outcome was, but the process was the problem, and that’s a microcosm of a lot of this.
At the same time, people are consuming less alcohol overall. One of the other issues we’re working on currently is the prevalence of hemp-derived THC beverages. I won’t get into the full nuance, but these were technically made legal through the last farm bill, eight years ago, which legalized hemp cultivation — there’s a loophole where if you extract THC and reinfuse it into a product, it’s technically not cannabis but still has THC in it. You’re seeing these sold at places like Total Wine, at grocery stores, gas stations, or shipped to your house — it’s basically federally legal cannabis, which wasn’t the intention of that law. That’s gaining popularity, and we’re not — to use the prohibitionist word ourselves — we’re not against these products existing, but there’s really no regulation for them.
That’s just an example of the outside threats the wine industry is facing. For a long time it was ready-to-drink cocktails supposedly killing the wine industry — there’s always something that’s going to kill the wine industry — and the industry does need to adapt better than it has, quite frankly, in certain respects. But there are legitimate concerns and threats out there.
Dave McIntyre 37:05
Yeah. In our conversation before we went live, you mentioned that two consecutive presidential administrations have had a president who doesn’t consume alcohol, which is unprecedented, at least in your time, but probably for all time. Trump has a winery — or his son does — but he’s imposing tariffs and doing other things we haven’t mentioned yet that are impacting the wine industry. So —
Michael Kaiser 37:57
Yeah, it was interesting — we’re talking about Trump, Biden, Trump, basically, and both have been friendly and adverse to the industry in different ways. Under the Biden administration, there was an executive order about the marketplace with a whole section on alcohol distribution, instructing the federal government to look at what could be done to alleviate issues alcohol producers were having with distribution at the state level. Since that was Biden-related, Trump canceled everything tied to it. But I also mentioned the tax bill — Trump signed that into law, in his first term. So those are two positive things, one from each administration. On the negative side, the Biden administration had that study I mentioned earlier for the dietary guidelines, and now, for wineries that export, the biggest issue is that we’re not exporting much of anything right now, which is directly related to tariffs.
If you’re a winery in Indiana, you might ask, “Why should I care about tariffs? I don’t export.” Well, you care about your ability to get tanks and barrels, and you care about distributors having problems because they can’t sell certain imported wines — that hurts their ability to sell your wines too.
The other argument I hear from the administration and others is that people will just switch to American wine. Probably not, because in a lot of cases American wine is more expensive. Here’s the example I always use: say you’re an Italian restaurant in Philadelphia, and you want small producers from a certain region in Italy to go with your cuisine. You’re not going to switch — you’re going to keep buying wine from Italy, which just means the cost gets passed to the consumer. It doesn’t create a new market for your wine if foreign wines aren’t available. Conversely, a grocery chain like Safeway is going to stock what sells, so they may look to a similar wine from California, South Africa, or South America to replace a European wine — they’re not going to suddenly go with a Virginia wine instead. The biggest thing I tell wineries is that you want your wine on store shelves, but there’s got to be a shelf for you to put it on, and if the cost of importing wine goes up too much, that shelf doesn’t just open up for domestic wines either.
Dave McIntyre 41:27
Yeah, okay, so we’re still feeling the impact of tariffs, and I imagine that’s still high on your agenda for WineAmerica in the coming year. What other issues will you be working on?
Michael Kaiser 41:45
Well, looking ahead — we’re going to have a new Congress next year. We don’t know what it’s going to look like. If the Democrats retake the House and the Senate, or just one of those two, there’ll likely be a lot of investigations into the last two years. The concern is whether there will be any actual governing happening, or more of what we’re seeing now, with investigations into how tariffs were implemented, for example.
The things that come up every year are primarily funding issues, and one thing we’re concerned about going forward is disaster relief funding — whether it’s the freeze here in the Mid-Atlantic and New York, or fires in Washington, Oregon, California, and now Idaho, we always have to seek disaster funding relief when that happens. One thing we might look at in the new year is establishing that funding on a standing basis, since we need it every year. Wine grapes are what’s known as a specialty crop, versus a row crop — specialty crops are things like strawberries, apples, and grapes. Row crops tend to get most of the farm and agriculture subsidies, so what we hope to do is get a dedicated disaster relief fund for specialty crops, along with management and mitigation funding.
We’re also going to have to see if more anti-alcohol measures come through Congress. The other side, if you want to call it that — I hate using that term, since I don’t know that there really are “sides” in this — is very organized. And with the volatility of this administration, in terms of predictability, and how that plays out with a different Congress, that could have an impact on everybody in the industry.
Dave McIntyre 45:04
And there is a bipartisan Congressional Wine Caucus.
Michael Kaiser 45:13
It’s primarily in the House, but senators can belong too. Mike Thompson from California is the chair — he represents Napa and part of Sonoma County, and is also a grape grower himself. Currently Dan Newhouse from Washington State is the Republican co-chair. It’s very bipartisan — we’re lucky that wine isn’t a divisive issue. As I mentioned with the craft beverage bill, we had close to 80 senators and over 300 House members on it. That’s an advantage of working in this industry — we work with everybody. I think the fact that the Wine Caucus is one of the larger caucuses in Congress is an example of how the industry has grown, and of the bipartisan nature of who we represent.
Dave McIntyre 46:41
And they have good parties.
Michael Kaiser 46:43
Yeah, we haven’t had a tasting in a while — I think you came to one when we did do it. We get wines, staff, and certain invited guests like yourself, and it’s a good way for congressional staff and members to taste wines they probably would never have tasted otherwise. Last time we did it, we had wine from Vermont, and we’ve had wine from places like Alabama and Louisiana, and just —
Dave McIntyre 47:29
— and South Dakota wine, at one a few years back — that was my first chance at that. It’s pretty cool.
Michael Kaiser 47:40
Yeah, it’s a lot of work, but we’re talking about maybe bringing it back, so we’ll see.
Dave McIntyre 47:46
All right, well, we’ve almost filled the hour — funny how fast the time goes. Is there anything else you’d like to add? For the few people who’ve joined us in the last few minutes, thank you again for joining WineLine Live with Michael Kaiser of WineAmerica.
Michael Kaiser 48:10
I’ll give both a professional and a personal view. Professionally, I think it’s important for wineries and the wine industry to have a trade association that represents them in D.C. On the personal side, I’d say: try something you’ve never had before. If you’re in a new city, or traveling, go to a local winery and see what it’s like, or try the local wine on a restaurant list, whether you’re traveling for work or pleasure. Just be open to exploring — I know we like to romanticize this, but it’s true: you might taste an IPA and it’ll basically taste like an IPA, but a Chardonnay from Virginia is going to taste different from a Chardonnay from Oregon. I want to see more consumers be willing to try that, and it’s gotten a lot better. I think the industry is in a good spot, and it’s gotten better over the years, but we’re still not all the way there.
Dave McIntyre 49:53
Right, so more to come in future years and future discussions. Final question: what is Michael Kaiser drinking when nobody’s watching?
Michael Kaiser 50:16
I’m kind of a sucker for what’s known as a macro beer — like a Budweiser. I love going to a baseball game and getting a Budweiser; there’s nothing romantic about that, but there’s a time and place for it. Obviously I drink wine, and different wines, but honestly, it’s probably a cheap beer.
Dave McIntyre 50:57
Okay, that’s fair enough. A lot of winemakers will tell you they can’t make good wine without a lot of beer. All right, having said that —
Michael Kaiser 51:06
— I do love craft beer too.
Dave McIntyre 51:08
Yeah, yeah. When I go to the ballpark, I’m looking for the local brew. All right, well, Michael, thank you again for taking time out to talk to us. And congratulations on your new position at WineAmerica. From this conversation today, I think we all know the organization is in good hands, and we look forward to inviting you back to check in on developments from time to time.
Michael Kaiser 52:19
I also want to point out, I have a shirt on that says “Drink Virginia” — I support every event.
Dave McIntyre 52:30
Yeah, well, I’d add New York, South Dakota, and a few others we’ve mentioned — Vermont, Texas. So thanks everyone for joining us, and for the thumbs-up and the likes and everything. Stay tuned for more on Dave McIntyre’s WineLine.
