JOPLIN, Mo. — New Year’s Eve is a time of year synonymous with champagne and wine. But it you haven’t purchased your favorite brand yet, depending upon where it’s from, you might be in for a rude awakening.

Like almost everything else, the cost of American-made wine and sparkling liquor has increased slightly throughout 2022 at roughly the rate of inflation. But the same can’t be said for foreign produced beverages of the same type.

“Price increase anywhere from 20 to 50 percent, shipping costs have gone up, production costs have gone up, by getting labor, people to fix it, but getting the product itself into the store has been really hard,” said LaNetta Lewis, Manager, Jugz Liquor & Microbrew.

And Lewis says she doesn’t think the price hike and availability of those beverages will change away anytime soon.

“Foreign wines are gonna still get harder and harder to get and distributors are gonna have more and more trouble getting them, getting them off the shipping containers has been a nightmare, getting them to the middle of the country has also been a nightmare, we’re not on a port where it’s going to be close, our distributors are in the middle of the country, they got a long way to go before they get here,” said Lewis.

But Lewis says the same thing can be said for all types of foreign produced liquor, not just wine and champagne. And to add to that, a drought in wine producing countries abroad. She says it’s a “golden” opportunity for domestic as well as Four State area producers.

“You’ve seen an uptick in the number of local wineries that are able to produce a really good product. We push a lot of the local wineries, we want them to succeed. They make wines just as good as some of the imported. So you’re gonna see a lot more of the smaller wineries expand to fill in the gap where imports aren’t,” said Lewis.