China’s announcement on Friday that it would impose new tariffs on U.S. goods came as unwelcome news to California vintners, who anticipate that the extra 15 percent charge on wine that China is planning could have disastrous effects on an increasingly important segment of their businesses.

As the fastest-growing wine market in the world, China is a crucial target for California wineries. The value of U.S. wine exports to China has increased 450 percent in the past decade, according to the Wine Institute, reaching $197 million in 2017.

China’s threat to levy tariffs on a host of U.S. goods came in response to President Trump’s move Thursday to impose duties on $60 billion worth of Chinese products.

Although the full implications of the tariff were still unclear Friday — and China’s statement did not say when any new tariff would take effect — many in the California wine industry speculated there would be a significant impact.

“There’s nothing positive about this,” said Michael Havens, an export broker with the firm California American Terroirs. “For brands that export to the People’s Republic, I can’t imagine the response won’t be damaging.”

The Wine Institute issued a statement Friday morning urging “all parties involved to resolve this dispute in a way that does not harm consumers or the hundreds of thousands of workers who rely on the wine industry for their livelihoods.”

California wineries have fought hard to gain a foothold in the burgeoning Chinese wine market. China “began to discover imported wines about 20 years ago,” said David Amadia, president of Ridge Vineyards in Cupertino. However, consumers’ interest was initially confined to French wines, particularly from Bordeaux.

But over the last decade, Amadia and others in the industry have spent considerable time in China trying to educate consumers and create demand for California wine. It was a slow start, he said, but in the last five years Ridge has seen consistent sales growth in China, and its wine is now in Michelin-star restaurants in Shanghai and Beijing.

Mid-tier wines may be the most vulnerable. “The demand in China is for the entry level, and then the high end,” said Havens. Will a 15 percent cost increase stop Chinese collectors from buying wines like Harlan, whose U.S. release price is $850? Maybe not. But 15 percent could make a big difference for wines at the $20 or $30 range.

Meanwhile, as China’s domestic wine industry continues to rise — the country is now the seventh-largest producer of wine in the world — another concern is that Chinese consumers could turn away from imported wines, especially those subject to high taxes, in favor of their domestic product.

Or maybe they’ll turn to wine from nations that have more favorable trade agreements with China. “Without question, these new tariffs imposed on our industry will affect our ability to be competitive against countries like Australia and Chile, which don’t have such tariffs,” said Corey Beck, CEO of Francis Ford Coppola Winery.

The tariff might not affect all California wineries equally. In fact, one of the most successful wineries exporting to China — Napa Valley’s Opus One — may be one of the least affected. Although Opus One sells a full 15 percent of its wine sold internationally in China and Hong Kong, all of its wine sold outside of the U.S. originates in the European Union, since the winery is jointly owned by a French company. Trade policy between the U.S. and China, therefore, may not have a direct impact.

Exporting wine to China is already a difficult and expensive proposition for American wine producers. Under China’s existing regulations, wines are subject to an import custom duty, excise tax and value-added tax, which can increase the bottle price by 41 percent. But even that underestimates the true cost, said Paul Roberts, chief operating officer of Colgin in Napa Valley.

“Whatever our price is in the U.S., it ends up being about 100 percent more in China,” Roberts said. (The 2014 vintage of Colgin’s flagship wine costs $550 in the U.S.) The prospect of passing along an additional 15 percent to the Chinese consumer would make Colgin’s wine accessible to even fewer drinkers, he said.

Hong Kong was a larger market for U.S. wine in 2017 than was mainland China, according to the Wine Institute report, and many vintners report that Hong Kong’s compliance requirements are considerably easier to meet. In fact, Roberts suspects that much of the Colgin wine that’s sold in mainland China has arrived there via Hong Kong, transferred in the so-called gray market.

Could the new tariffs force even more high-end wine sales underground?

Havens, the California American Terroirs export broker, for now has stopped working in the Chinese market. The payback is not worth those duties and an onerous compliance burden, he said. “China is in the top tier of difficulty among all countries we export to.”

But many U.S. wineries feel that they can’t afford to ignore a wine market whose consumption habits are growing so rapidly. And for those who have worked hard to establish a presence in China, the tariff announcement felt like a low blow.

“There aren’t a lot of categories in which U.S. products have been this successful in China, particularly on the consumer side,” said Ridge’s Amadia. “A lot of people have put in a lot of hard work to find this success.”

The tariff threat, he continued, “makes me feel like we’ve really been hung out to dry in this whole process.”