I have spent 20 years building a wine-import company. On Jan. 14, the Trump administration could destroy it all by imposing a 100 percent tariff on European wine.

Mine is not the only American business that would suffer. The United States imports over $4.25 billion a year in European wine, which is handled by thousands of importers, distributors, wine stores and restaurants. In recent weeks we’ve all been scrambling to avoid disaster. We are sending emails and letters to clients, begging them to call their representatives in Congress. We are fighting not just to be able to drink European wine; we are fighting for our livelihoods and for our hundreds of thousands of employees.

We have already been hurt by tariffs. In October — a peak season for wine sales — the government imposed a 25 percent tariff on French, Spanish and German wines, along with single-malt Scotch and other European food products.

I and most of the other importers I know spent weeks on the phone negotiating with winemakers to keep working with us. Many of them wanted to walk away from the United States market; after all, these days demand from Asia is huge. We cut margins and raised prices as little as possible, all the while wasting precious time we would have normally devoted to trying to increase our sales.