Category Archives: The [yellow tail] Saga

My name is Skippy the Bush Kangaroo

The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about the homeland of [yellow tail]

by Skippy the Bush Kangaroo

Before we go any further let’s get one thing completely straight: the creature depicted on the [yellow tail] label is not a kangaroo. It is a yellow-footed wallaby, and what’s more there are no yellow-footed wallabies anywhere near the Riverina region of New South Wales (NSW) where Casella Wines, the producer of [yellow tail] is based. That means [no kangaroo] and [yellow feet]! I speak as an Australian Marsupial, to be precise as an Eastern Grey Kangaroo, so I know what I’m talking about. I was selected by the Great Council of Australian Marsupials to correct what we feel to be a serious eurocentric bias to this story. They chose me, because many of you know me as „Skippy the Bush Kangaroo“ from the 1966-71 TV series of the same title which was shown around the world, and it was felt that for you might be more inclined to listen to what I have to say.

The white killers who made their first brief appearances on our continent four centuries ago are very different to the black killers who came to this land roughly 50,000 years before them. Most of the black Australiens are very good at remembering, but the white Australiens are world champions at forgetting, particularly if the truth doesn’t suit their current purposes. Let me remind you how the Dutchman Dirk Hartog, one of the first white Europeans to visit Australia described what he found in 1616. „This land is cursed; the animals hop, not run, birds run, not fly and the swans are black, not white.“ Today the coat of arms of Australia contains a kangaroo and an emu, though most of the white race in this land still regard both creatures as something between vermin and a pest. For them, black swans are symbols of sudden financial disaster.

Do some of you find it outrageous when I call Australians of European descent „white killers“?Many of them shoot us Eastern Grey Kangaroos with the permission of the state, which in the case of the Riverina means the NSW Department of Environment, Climate Change and Water (DECCW). For example, its figures for the Griffith Kangaroo Management Zone estimated that the population of Eastern Grey Kanagaroos fell from 638,262 in 2008 to 321,138 in 2009 due to drought. This resulted in the usual quota of roughly 3% of the population of my species for the annual „harvest“ being replaced by a year long ban. However, many white Australians kept on shooting us without the permission of the DECCW, just as they had did before and continue to do. They call it sport!

The white Killers are very proud of the country they have forged here with the help of their guns, irrigation systems, and the plants and animals they imported to try and make the driest and hotest continent on the planet more like Europe. The very name New South Wales expresses this urge to ignore reality. Of course, almost all of them have forgetten that when Captain James Cook „discovered“ Botany Bay (now Sydney) in 1770 he mistook the wet season for the dry one. The result of this was that the Europeans’ first colony in Australia very nearly failled due to a series of disastrous crop faillures.

The stories of the land which became the Riverina region is typical of the story of White Australia since then. When John Oxley became the first white killer to see this piece of the contintent in 1817 he wrote that it was, „country which, for barrenness and desolation, can I think have no equal.“ But he greatly underestimated both the drive of the white race to transform and dominate this land. He also did not realize how many black killers, or Wiradjuri Aborigines, were living nearby along the banks of the Murrumbidge River. They sometimes killed us for food, but only when the fishing in the Murrumbidge was poor. Soon the white killers were at war with the Wiradjuri who vigorously resisted the loss of their fishing grounds and sacred sites for about 20 years from 1821. If an Aborigine were writing this instead of me, then probably they choose the double Wimbeldon womens’ singles champion Evonne Goolagong, a Wiradjuri born in Griffith in 1951, to do so.

The other thing which John Oxley failled to see coming was the gold rush which began in the neighbouring state of Victoria in 1851. For the next twenty years Australia was the largest gold producer in the world. During the three years to 1854 the white population of Melbourne more than quadrupled and within the decade which ended in 1861 the white population of Australia grew from 437,655 to 1,151,947. Australia would look very different today if that gold had not been discovered, but it would also be a rather different place if the iron ore, diamonds, uranium and other mineral resources currently being exploited were not in such a great demand by China. It is also clear to us Marsupials that, unlike the Aborigines, the great majority of the white race would prefer to extract wealth from the ground, rather than manage the land for further generations. Their agriculture is also often an „extractive“ industry which either depletes soil fertility, results in soil erosion or increases soil salinity until it can no longer support crops. The history of the white man is one of how he has repeatedly destroyed the soil beneath his own feet.

But just how was the Riverina transformed by the white race from „desolation“ in 1817 into what the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH) of November 13^th 2008 called „the richest tract of agrciultural land in Australia“? At first the landscape of the Riverina changed only slowly, at least to the naked eye. In 1853 the first riverboats came up the Murrumbidgee, then in 1876 the iron horse followed and the region became a major supplier of beef and lamb to Melbourne and of wool to the mighty British textile industry. The arrival of sheep and rabbits lead to the extinction of some marsupials and a drastic reduction in the numbers of others as our habitats changed irreversibly. Since the white killers arrived in Australia they have eradicated 23 species of Marsupials here.

Then in 1912 came a change that would make everything that went before seem insignifcant. In that year the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area (MIA) was founded, and during subsequent decades the construction of the Hume, Burrinjuck and Blowering dams enabled its expansion to the present 1,820 square kilometers. The diverted river water instantly transformed the hot semi-arid climate of the Riverina from a problem for the White Race into a great advantage for all manner of crops be artificially more than doubling the rainfall. Today the region produces 80% of all grapes and wine in NSW, 90% of all citrus fruits, all the gherkins used by MacDonalds in Australia and the vast majority of Australian rice. As Italian immigrants to the region after the Second World War discovered, the combination of climate and irrigation is also ideal for marijauna growing. This is so profitable that only major police crackdowns like that described in the SMH article of April 3^rd 2011 „Griffith mafia returns to its grass roots“ can keep it in check. During the two weeks prior to this report the NSW police siezed AUS$ 23 million worth of marijauna plants growing in orchards and vineyards around the town of Griffith. Which finally brings us to the vines!

The Riverina is one of a handful of intensively irriagted winegrowing regions in Murray-Darling Basin which dominate bulk wine production in Australia. By bulk wine I mean wines which end up in bag-in-box and cheap bottles on supermarket shelves around the world. In common with most [yellow tail] bottlings, they are invariably marketed under the georgraphical designation „Southeastern Australia“ which enables wines from those intensively irrigated regions to be blended together. For a Marsupial like me who has a very clear sense of home whose contours are particular rocks, trees and bilabongs this designation says everything about the disrespect for the land of the majority of white Australians. Thankfully, some of them now see things the same way as us. The following words are from a white Australian who grew up in one of these winegrowing regions and left for reasons which his words make clear. „Where I come from the vineyard yield can be up to 45 tons per hectare, which is grape skins filled with river water. I never wanted to see vines again!“ The enviromental cost? The website of the Australian Broadcasting Corportation (www.abc.com.au) declares the MIA to be one of three areas in NSW at greatest risk from increased soil salinity. The problem? Irrigation results in a rising water table and the ground water carries salt from deep under the surface up into the soil. This threatens the future of agriculture, and of winegrowing. What did I say: white killers!

Burn Baby Burn !

Israeli Gas, Israeli Guns and [yellow tail]

By Esther Moriarty & Stuart Pigott

For a long time all the happy families promotion for the great no-brainer wine megabrand [yellow tail] seemed to work like a dream for the Casellas with sales, turnover and profits growing, growing, growing. Of course, you have to do something with that kind of profits and there’s a limit to how much you can invest in a winery once you’ve already got the fastest bottling line on Planet Wine, as Casella Wines does. Therefore it wasn’t a surprise to read in an article published in the October 30^th 2010 issue of the Sydney Morning Herald (SMH3) under the title of ‘Lawyers, guns, money, the sting in Yellow Tail’ that the Casella family’s real estate investments in Griffith and Yenda include two winery buildings, farms and a former retirement home and that they extend to a commerical building in St. Leonards/Sydney for which they paid AUS$5.15 in November 2009 plus a shopping centre on the Gold Coast of New South Wales purchased for AUS$16.4 million in September 2009.

You might think that this would encourage local people to view the Casellas as prominent and respectable members of the community, but maybe not. SMH3 not only reports that The Griffith Show has been renamed the Casella Wines Annual Show, but quoted an anonymous woman connected with the local authority as saying, “they might as well change the town’s name to Casella.” Now, doesn’t that sound a little bitter to you? Are the Casellas less than well loved in their home town? Yes, the questions are back and they are multiplying again!

The family worked hard to make [yellow tail] consumers view them as animal lovers. Recently according to an article on the ‘Field & Game Australia Inc.’ website, Casella Wines has pledged US$100,000 to the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) an animal rights organisation that in Australia is represented through Humane Society International (HSI). The HSI campaigns against the NSW Shooters Party and has a firm position against hunting. Now all Casella Wines labels in the US will carry the HSUS name. However. according to SMH3 the youngest of the three Casella brothers, Marcello, who you may remember served some time for his involvement in a huge Marijuana crop back in the 1990s (see Episode 5), is planning to build an ammunition factory near Griffith capable of producing up to 10 million shotgun cartridges a year. Blasting with shotguns at roadsigns and kangaroos is a common pastime amongst certain Australian farmers.

However, even this piece of entrepreneurial daring looks cautious and conservative compared to John Casellas Israeli oil and gas exploration company; Cassal Drilling. SMH3 reports that Roy Spagnolo, the Casella family’s accountant in Griffith, as having told the Israeli authorities in May 2010 the company planned to invest at least AUS$60 million in their country. Accoridng to SMH3 Cassal Drilling had already hit a rock in the road though, coming under legal fire in Jerusalem from Rodney Salfinger, the company’s former managing director. Salfinger clearly has a no-holds-barred approach to business disputes, since he told the Sydney Morning Herald that John Casella had been providing the Papua New Guinea police with israeli weapons. Casella did not dispute intending to expand his oil and gas exploration project to Papua New Guinea, but strongly denied Salfinger’s allegations. However, SMH3 reports that photographs were circulating of two Papua New Guinea policemen testing weaponry with an Israeli director of Cassal Drilling. It seems the pictures were taken at the plant of Israel Weapon Industries, maker of the famous Uzi machinegun. Why are a whole lot more guns suddenly turning up in this wine story? Couldn’t we please go back to the Shiraz, or even Chardonnay?

SMH3 also reported a lot of ugly details about Salfinger who then faced prosecution in the US after allegedly producing a revolver at his daughter’s wedding. Yet more guns! On top of this in October 2007 an Australian judge described a legal action brought by Salfinger against the Niugini Mining company as a, “clumsy fraud,” which he, “sought to maintain by repeated acts of reckless perjury.” Maybe John Casella’s barrister, Steve Stanton, was spot on when he said of his client, “His only bad judgement has been to choose Mr Salfinger as a joint venture partner,” Considering that, according to SMH3, their business partnership had lasted 15 years, i.e. it began in [pre-yellow tail] times, you have to ask why it took John Casella so long to figure out that he’d chosen the wrong business partner? Or does Salfinger sound like a reliable and trustworthy businessman to you?

Back to Israel where, according to SMH3, John Casella obtained his first drilling licence in October 2007 and shortly afterwards incorporated Cassal Drilling. By October 2010 work seems to have begun on the company’s first project amongst sand dunes wedged between the Gaza strip and an industrial park next to the port of Ashkelon. SMH3 reported two off-shore projects were also “in the pipeline” [pun]. It is important to point out here that off-shore oil and gas is a seldom-reported factor behind the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians. It all goes back to the discovery of the Gaza Marine 1 and Gaza Marine 2 gas fields in 2000 by a consortium led by British Gas (BG), the Lebanese-owned Consolidated Contractors International Company (CCC), and the Palestinian Authority (PA), then still lead by Yasser Arafat. BG estimated the combined reserves of the two fields as being worth 4 billion dollars, which made the Palestinian Authority’s 10% share in the consortium look very helpful for a fledgling Palestinian State. In May 2007 the Israeli Cabinet approaved a deal for Israel to buy gas from the PA, the idea being to pump the gas ashore at Ashkelon close to Cassal Drilling’s first project, but it seems that security objections from Mossad were immediately followed by the Israeli attack on Gaza in December 2007 which finally torpedoed the deal.

The recent the upheavals in the Arab world have reshuffled the Middle East diplomatic pack and amazingly discussions between the Israeli government and the PA about the gas off Gaza’s shore restarted early this year. Meanwhile, Israeli pressure on Hamas and the population of Gaza continues as an article published in the July 25^th issue of The Guardian entitled, ‘Troubled waters: Palestinian fishermen caught in Israeli gunboat policing net’ makes clear. It reports how the 1993 Oslo accords gave the Palestinian fishermen of Gaza permission to fish up to 20 nautical miles off the coast, but in December 2007 the Israeli government unilaterally imposed a 3 nautical mile fishing limit as part of its land and sea blockade of Gaza. Then followed a graphic description of how this limit is imposed by Israeli gunboats. It was no suprise to us to learn that the United Nations judges this to be the collective punishment of civilians in violation of international law. Is this part of a wider Israeli stratergy to deny Hamas access to the gas below the sea bed off the coast of Gaza? Aren’t there less dangerous places to invest in oil and gas exploration? And isn’t the burning of fossil fuels largely responsible for global warming?

An important Money Question

Just for a moment let’s backtrack to Episode 5, which raised an important money question: how could a company subject to regular inspection by the tax authorities use the contents of hidden sacks or tins of cash to it’s advantage? Some years back I heard some ugly stories about the chief salesman of a European wine company with major exports to the US. Let’s call him “Carlo”, which is not his real name. I met Carlo a number of times and he always struck me as being a totally unscrupulous character, so I feel highly inclined to believe all the stories I heard about him. Apparently Carlo was paying “kick backs”, or illegal incentives, to US wine merchants who placed large orders with him. Legal incentive include things like prizes for the best salesaman and, of course, they go through the company books. The stories said that in return for each large order Carlo would pass a brown envelope containing cash “under the table” to the person placing the order, both as a thank you and to provide them with a damned good reason to re-order as fast as possible. If you were launching a new wine brand and you were as unscrupulous as Carlo you could use a stache of cash to ease your product’s entry into the market and rapidly gain the omnipresence that is a prerequisite for it jumping from obscurity to megabrand status.

A company Profile of Casella Wines in Issue 5/2007 of Wine Business magazine tells the story of how back in the early days of [yellow tail] Wine Australia, the official body for the promotion of Australian wine internationally,  gave Cassella Wines a subsidy which they invested in Australian bush hats and oilskin jackets. These were given to the sales force of their US importer W.J. Deutsch & Sons who used them as a funny, feel-good sales tool. The story also stressed that [yellow tail] was never discounted and that this worked because healthy margins for everyone involved were built in from the beginning. That is, of course, a totally different strategy to Carlo’s aggressive use of kick backs to fuel the sales machine. Even today nobody can tell me where Carlo got all that cash from.

The co-authors at a strenuous editorial conference

[happy families] or blackmail in wine paradise

by Esther Moriarty & Stuart Pigott

So what kind of people are the Casellas really? Are we ready to believe they are as rosy-cheeked and cleaned-faced as they wish us to perceive them?

Why suddenly such direct and probing questions? Well we have been reading the archives of the Sydney Morning Herald, Australia’s oldest continuously published newspaper and to this day one of the nation’s most important daily newspapers. There we found a very different Casella story from that told on the [yellow tail] website. Before taking a look at the flip side of the ultimate wine megabrand and its makers, let us remind ourselves how they tell their own story on that website.

In 1957 Filippo Casella and his wife Maria emigrated from Sicily to Australia with their children Rosa and Joe. A small town named Yenda, close to Griffith in the agricultural Riverina region of New South Wales, welcomed the Casella family with open arms. There the couple had two further sons, John and Marcello, and in 1966 were able to to continue the family winegrowing tradition after buying farm 1471 and planting their first vines in Australia. They also planted some peach trees and plum trees for prunes, because just about everything grows really well in this sunny, well-irrigated paradise. In 1971 Casella Wines crushed their first 50 tons of grapes. Just thirty years later in 2001 they launched [yellow tail] selling 12 million bottles of their new brand in the US in the first year. Over the next 3 years [yellow tail] miraculously grew to become the number one imported wine to the US. Allow us to put that into perspective, this time without direct reference to the [yellow tail] website; by 2005 the megabrand was more popular in the US than all French wines combined!

Now let us turn to the archive of the Sydney Morning Herald, beginning with an article published in the December 11th 2009 issue (SMH1) under the title ‘Man tried to blackmail wine patriarch for $5.5m, court told’. It was followed by ‘How a blackmailer stung Australia’s leading wine dynasty’ on July 17^th 2010 (SMH2), then ‘Lawyers, guns, money: the sting in Yellow Tail’ on October 30^th 2010 (SMH3). Already the titles of these stories suggested to us that there might be rather more to the [yellow tail] story than we had hitherto imagined. Then when we read those articles abd that impression was dramaticaly confirmed. On the one hand they made many things about the Casellas and their hometown of Griffith suddenly very clear to us, but a lot else remained very unclear and we ended up asking ourselves those two direct and probing questions. We sought for answers, but the further we dug into the matter the more the questions multiplied.

One thing which immediately became clear from SMH3 was that in 1995 Marcello Casella, today Director of Vineyard Operations at Casella Wines, went to jail for five years over a marijuana crop in the north of Queensland worth an estimated AUS$57 million. His arrest, along with eight others, was the result of a long investigation into organised crime by the National Crime Authority. We asked ourselves if Marcello Casella was caught with the first batch of marijauna he was ever involved with, or if he succeed in completing other similar transactions without getting caught. And if so was he able to stache away a pile of cash before he was put away?

From SMH3 we also discovered that when Marcello Casella was arrested John Casella, today Managing Director and Winemaker of Casella Wines, was working at Riverina Estate Wines (now Warburn Estate Winery) for the owner Tony Sergi. In 1979 the Woodward Royal Commission into Drug Trafficking declared Sergi to be a “principle”’ of the Italian Mafia in Griffith who were heavily involved in the marijauna trade during the 1960s and ’70s. They also named him as a member of the Calabrian Mafia cell that organised the the murder of the anti-drugs campaigner Donald Mackay in Griffith in 1977.

Of course, all this doesn’t mean that John Casella was ever a member of the Mafia or ever directly involved in Mafia business. But we asked ourselves if Tony Sergi really had nothing to do with the Mafia during the twelve years John Casella worked for him before returning to the family company in 1994? Either way, John Casella grew up in a region that was one of the centres of organised crime in Australia. Is his current life as a respectable and successful businessman a reaction against this background? That would be entirely understandable, but the questions didn’t stop multiplying there.

Most of SMH1 is devoted to reporting how a couple of days earlier in Griffith Matteo de Dominicis was charged with blackmailing the Casella family for more than half a million Australian dollars and attempting to extort a further 5 million. According to the article de Dominicis allegedly demanded a total of AUS$ 645,000 from John Casella (the police charge sheet detailed the de Dominicis’ demands as follows: AUS$300,000 on February 29^th 2008, AUS$150,000 between April 1^st and May 3^rd 2008 and AUS$195,000 on November 1^st 2008). SMH2, published after de Dominicis had pleaded guilty to two counts of blackmail, reports that John Casella deposited all these sums into de Dominicis bank account, citing threats of violence to his family as the reason for paying up. But is that the only reason why he waitted so long before finally calling the police on December 6^th 2009?

Just a few days prior to that de Domincis demanded the AUS$5 million from him, and maybe even with the enormous success of [yellow tail] he simply couldn’t pay. Or had something more than vthe threat of violence prevented him from calling in the police then? According to SMH2 de Dominicis asserted that in 1988 he gave Filippo Casella 2 kilogramms of marijuana seeds, enough to grow a multi-million dollar crop, and SMH3 reports that he claimed in court that this was the reason that the Casellas owed him all the money. As well as insisting that marijauna growing ran in the Casella family, de Dominicis also claimed in court that Filippo Casella was involved in the 1986 murder of his borther-in-law Nunzio Greco, a money launderer for the Mob. There is no hard evidence to back up any of these ugly claims and they could well be no more than the wild fantasies of a criminal mind, but regardless of that the whole thing resembles a brutal Quentin Tarantino Mafia movie more than the story of a successful family-owned winery.

SMH2 also reports that for years Griffith has been rife with rumours of bags and tins of cash the Casellas buried in the vineyards, some of which might still be there. Those rumours may also be no more than the fantasies of local people frustrated by their own inability to evade the tax man, or even just the result of the lure of buried treasure. However, it is hardly astonishing that a heady cocktail of truths, half-truths and wild allegations in a region with a history of organised crime should keep the rumour mill turning. For example, in 1999 the launch of Casellas Wines’ Carramar Estate brand in the US market failled disamlly, yet the company still had the capital to launch [yellow tail] on an even bigger scale just one year later. Is it astonishing that local people then asked themselves where all the money to build this wine empire came from? It certainly couldn’t have come only from the sale of peaches, and prunes from farm 1471.

In recent years Casella Wines has tried to promote itself as wholesome family company with a community-friendly brand according to the motto what’s good for Casella Wines is good for Griffith and that’s good for Australia too. In interviews, like that which appeared in the July/August 2009 issue of Winestate magazine John Casella repeats his vision for the future of Casella Wines: ”It’s about keeping family together, working together and giving the world something that nobody else is – and that’s value-for-money wines from a place that is relatively insignificant in world terms.” It sounds like well-learnt promotional lines and they don’t sound better through repitition. When asked by Winestate magazine how he spends his Christmases his tone turns to heavy-duty sentimentality: ”We always have lunch together on Christmas day as a family – and sometimes even dinner as well!” All together around one table, twice in one day! SMH2 is illustrated with a photograph of just such a Casella family gathering. Take a look and you can see one of the world’s truly [happy families].

Wine Truisms Nr.73: wine comes in boxes

Millions of Moving Boxes and Unexpected Competition for Coke and Pepsi

Business is business, but what exactly is business when you get down to the nitty-gritty? We journalists tend to think of our work as a serious and sophisticated matter that requires great intelligence, experience and a sixth sense for what makes a great story. Sometimes journalism actually reads like it’s the product of those things, but even then it’s still the result of moving a mass of words from the journalist’s working space into the public domain through a medium (be that process flashy and digital or plain old analog). Of course, at some point money has to move in the other direction or the journalist goes belly-up, drying up the flow of his or her words. I have to admit I still get a thrill from seeing my words get out there and from seeing payments from publishers land in my bank account. I try hard to keep both feet on the ground, but in spite of that I sometimes feel I’m doing something seriously special.

Take a cold hard look at the sales and distribution aspects of journalism though and it immediately becomes clear that there’s little real difference between this business and others revolving around products which at first glance look completely different. As my sadly departed friend in the New York wine business Louis Broman used to say, „selling wine is all about moving boxes“. Those he was responsible for arrived in the Big Apple in containers from France, Germany and Spain, then Louis moved them from the warehouse into New York restaurants and stores. From there the contents of the bottles in those boxes had to move into consumers mouths and this cause feelings of pleasure, excitement or some other positive reaction, just as my words have to reach your eyes and arouse your interest, amuse you, or at least distract you from all the other dumb and exciting stuff you could otherwise be looking at.

Regardless of what the product is it not only has to turn consumers on, but they also have to percieve the price as a bargain or at least as fair, or it bites the dust. How big would Coca-Cola be today if over the decades since its launch in 1886 consumers had loved the taste, but repeatedly felt it was far too expensive? It certainly would never have gained the highest recognition of any brand on earth! These are the hard economic facts of brand-life and brand-death.

Frank Prial’s April 23^rd 2006 New York Times story on [yellow tail] quotes a number of experts on these crucial aspects of the most successful wine brand the world has ever seen. Jon Fredrickson, a California wine industry consultant observes, „Yellow Tail caught the wave. It’s perfect for the new generation of wine drinkers and potential wine drinkers…the perfect wine for a public grown up on soft drinks…round, fruity and user-friendly.“ Maybe not only wine megabrands like Jacobs Creek and Gallo need to watch out that [yellow tail] doesn’t hop over them, but also Coke and Pepsi!

Rick Cartiere, the editor of Wine Report asserts that, „Yellow Tail, at $6, was and remains better than most American wines at $8,99 and $10,99.“ That description makes it sound like it offers masses of flavour for a price that is friendly, but not so cheap that it looks suspicously like the result of dross being dumped on the market to reduce a winery’s bloated inventory. A quote from Robert Parker, the world’s most influential wine critic, puts the icing on the cake, „if the truth be known these are surprisingly well-made offerings.“ Praise for $6 wines doesn’t get higher than that!

If we take the experts’ word, then this raises the question of how Casella was able to make [yellow tail] taste so good for such a moderate price. The answer is much easier to get at than you might think, for exactly as the brand was launched tidal waves of cheap product were washing onto the Australian bulk wine (i.e. „raw wine“ bought and sold by the tanker load) market. When John Casella joined the family company in 1994 it was exclusively producing bulk wine, so he quickly learend all about the that business and could see that Australia’s wine production would rapidly increase due to new vineyard plantings and where this would lead the bulk wine market.

At the turn of the last century generous tax breaks in Australia to encourage new vineyard plantings persuaded many high-earning professionals to avoid income tax by investing in winegrowing. At the time that seemed like a no-brainer given Australia’s excellent image as a wine producer and the then healthy bulk wine prices. Unfortunately during the three years it takes from preparing the ground to plant a new vineyard to harvesting the first crop a lot can happen in the bulk wine market.

Between 1998 and 2003 the area planted with the Shiraz vine in Australia leap-froged from 10,000 to 33,000 hectares while demand for Australian Shiraz wines around the world grew, but more slowly. A dramatic fall in the price for Shiraz grapes and bulk wine was the inevitable result and other popular varieties expereinced similar if lesser price falls. How did so many of those professionals fail to see that road-train (huge Australian trucks with two trailers) barrelling down the road in their direction? Many of them left the planting and cultivation of their vineyards in the hands of consultants, so meagre was their interest in winegrowing. No wonder that truck hit them full in the face!

John Casella surely saw all this coming and realized that if he kept selling bulk wine by the tanker load, like his father Filippo Casella had done, then the family company would be stuck on a downward spiral. However, if he switched to buying bulk wine, then those falling prices would suddenly be enormously to his advantage. What he needed to set the family company on an upward spiral was a wine brand extremely attractive to inexperienced consumers and a distribution net that would put that product right under their noses.

This was provided by W.J. Deutsch & Sons of White Plains/New York founded by Bill Deutsch in 1981. By the time John Casella first met him and his son Peter in 1997 W.J. Deutsch & Sons was no longer the small family company it started out as, the exclusive US distribution rights for Georges Duboeuf Beaujolais (one of the few non-snooty and genuinely popular French wine brands), having already pushed the company up into the first league of wine brands in the US market. Through this work W.J. Deutsch & Sons built up an impressive coast-to-coast distrbution network that was just waitting for a new killer wine brand to be pumped into it and in turn be pumped up by this great selling machine. All that new brand needed was the right attitude, look, taste and price.

Casella’s first attempt at this, the Carramar Estate wines launched in the US in 1999 and failled spectacularly, perhaps for no other reason than that the brand had a totally boring name that made it seem utterly anonymous. The turth is though that the smartest marketing people on the planet have made similar mistakes by trying too hard to fit in with what already works best in the market and ending up getting totally lost in the crowd.

Then Casella Wines bought [yellow tail], an archetypaly Australian brand „off the shelf“ from Barbarba Harkness, filled the bottles with low cost bulk wine blended to exactly fitted consumers expectations of Australian wine. Initally there was only a red Shiraz and a white Chardonnay, the archetypal Oz red and white grape varieties. KISS: keep it simple stupid!

Deutsch had an extra reason to push the new brand into the market with such energy, for according to that April 23^rd 2006 New York Times story about [yellow tail] the Deutsch family had become 50/50 partners in the brand with the Cassellas. That makes it only logical that W.J. Deutsch & Sons should have grown in lock-step with [yellow tail]; the brand was their ticket to The Big Time.

The March 2006 issue of Beverage Media quotes Roy Dann, sernior Vice President of Deutsch for sales and Marketing as saying that during the 5 years following the launch of [yellow tail] Deutsch’s total sales of all brands rose 630%. That’s almost too good to be true, even if the two partner families always said that they couldn’t get along with each other better. [happy families!]

Stuart Pigott

Cuddly animals unite!

The [yellow tail] Label as a Window on the Wine’s Soul

They may only be little rectangular pieces of paper glued on glass bottles, but they’ve changed life on an entire planet: Planet Wine. Analysing a wine label can quickly become terminally boring or turn into a silly intellectual game, but there’s so much to say about the [yellow tail] label I’m going to risk both. The genius of this package begins with its conflation of the kangaroo and aboriginal culture into an image of knockout clarity that etches itself into your memory whether you want it to or not. There’s quite a story behind the invention of this icon of modern Australian wine, but before I tell it let’s grab some context, not least because it gives the story more punch.

[yellow tail] is frequently described as being one of the first „critter wines“, that is wines whose labels feature cute or cuddly animals. Several years ago the American satirical magazine The Onion came up with a law of critter wines which says that the quality of the wine is inversely proportional to the cuteness of the critter. In my experience this is horribly true. If there’s a sweet labrador or a smilling pig on the label the wine is almost certain to be complete schlock. Though the „aboriginal“ kangaroo on the [yellow tail] label is obviously part of the western romanticising of noble savages – being so completely in tune with the cosmos we imagine the Aborigines must all be on first name terms with God and long ago unravelled all the great mysteries – it is positively hard-edged compared with the cloying sentimentality of teddy bears and other soft toys. [yellow tail] is a critter wine in the same way that Crocodile Dundee, the title figure of the 1986 film played by Paul Hogan, is a real Australian. Of course, the [yellow tail] roo and Dundee are old mates!

In contrast, the use of colour coding – yellow is the most important colour, but is supported by some warm reds and oranges and strong blues – is hardly original, having been introduced by the Champagne industry decades ago. As marketing guru Randall Grahm pointed out in his lecture ‘Bungle in the Jungle’ it, „owes a tremendous intellectual debt to the truly innovative packaging of Veuve Cliquot, designed more than thirty years ago. As he observes, „among wine sales and marketing people…Cliquot still retains a certain mystical allure, which is a testament to the enormous power of its brand.“ What [yellow tail] does is to thoroughly modernise this idea and give it an element of fun that is badly missing from Veuve Cliquot. Then there’s the reduction of the information on the front label to the absolute minimum necessary to communicate the identity of the product. This is a widespread trend on Planet Wine, but mostly the result manages to look half-hearted yet remain really confusing.

Let me describe what strike me as the most important aspects of the bottle of [yellow tail] Shiraz red wine on the desk in front of me now. Most obviously there is the eye-popping yellow strip-label with the brand name emblazoned on it that is as unforgettable as the Nike swipe. The way it is all printed in lower case in square brackets suggests the world of e-mail, in a way that makes it seem totally familiar to everyone who is part of [contemporary western mainstream].

The only other information on it is the name of the grape variety, Shiraz. Shiraz is the archetypal Australian wine grape, though it is actually the same variety as the French Syrah and was imported from its homeland in the Rhône Valley to Australia almost two hundred years ago. But that observation belongs to the minefield of wine connoiseurship which this brand hops around with such agility. Shiraz is only on the label to tell you which member of the happy family of [yellow tail] wines is in this particular bottle. By remembering just the brand name and the colour of the strip-label the consumer knows exactlly which wine you enjoyed so much yesterday evening. It’s a genuine no brainer, something incredibly rare in the incredibly complex and confusing world of wine!

The rectangular black label below the strip-label is dominated by the aboriginal kangaroo of which the only part that is actually yellow is its thighs and paws. This gently suggests to us that the name is ironic and the tail refered to might be of another kind altogether, which is both vageuly suggestive and rather funny. There is none of the Old World wine guff, but enough information (“vintage 2010“ top left and „Casella Wines – Product of Australia“ bottom right) to suggests this is an honest product with nothing to hide, neatly completing the user-friendly package.

John Casella likes to tell the story of how he discovered the brand name in a dictionary complete with the square brackets and lower case letters, and maybe that moment did occur, but for reasons that will soon become apparent this seems experience must have been a confirmation of their rightness, rather than a genuine eureka moment of discovery. What he can claim the kudos for is the decision to go full throttle with this package in the US market at the very moment when the largest Australian wine exporter seriously slipped up reorganizing their US distribution. Casella and his US importer grasped this golden opportunity with great energy.

It seems that the story of [yellow tail] as a Casella Wines brand goes back to a meeting in 1999 between the company’s then marketing director John Soutter, who resigned in 2007, and graphic designer Barbara Harkness, whose design agency Just Add Wine now has offices in Sydney and Adelaide. One version of the story says that they met at Sydney Airport, which seems appropriate for a global wine megabrand, and because the Quantas logo is also kangaroo; [what else?] According to www.justaddwine.com.au [yellow tail] was a „ready to go concept“ she offered Soutter, „off the shelf. In fact, the website claims that it was her first sale of such a fully finished „imaginative brand solution“ designed for the „international stage“, now the company’s contemporary speciality and an important part of contemorary wine marketing.

Incidentally, Barbara Harkness is a white Australian, so the label is only [aboriginal]. One of the few sources of hard information about the brand’s background is a 23^rd April 2006 article in The New York Times by Frank Prial, then the newspaper’s wine critic. Prial asserts that Harkness was paid just $4,800 by Casella Wines for the concept, which would buy just 801 bottles of [yellow tail] retail in the US. John Casella got the ultimate bargain in the history of wine marketing.

Stuart Pigott

Episode 4 follows on Sunday, September 25th !

Randall Grahm, the wine marketing guru who got terroir religion!

Follow the [yellow tail] road, or the Magical Marketing of the Wine from Oz

Almost immediately I started researching the biggest story in wine today I stumbled upon a lecture given by Randall Grahm of Bonny Doon Vineyard in Santa Cruz/California to the OIV – the UN of wine – at their 2006 congress in Logrono/Spain entitled ‘Bungle in the Jungle’ which was mostly about the runaway susccess of [yellow tail]. That Grahm should give the brand so much attention itself seemed highly significant, because he is not only a marketing genius, but also a fanatic for terroir wines. The T-word is French, meaning a distinctive taste deriving from the place where the wine grew, which theoretically cannot be copied elsewhere. This is the exact opposite of what Grahm calls the new „megabrands“ and „winelike beverages“ such as [yellow tail]. No wonder he sub-titled his penetrating analysis of this phenomenon ‘A Season in Wine Hell’. For him, though not for us, the world of [yellow tail] is literally wine hell!

Grahm began his lecture with an important observation about the nature of contemporary retailing in general, that is the advent of, „extra-large distributors and super-sized retail chains – two sides of the same coin…[and] there are analogs in virtually every retail business sector around the globe.“ This vreated a new retailing environment. This enabled the new wine megabrands to, „establish its credibility on essentially the fact that it sells well.“ This makes it sounds like the chicken-or-the-egg-first riddle: [yellow tail] has credibility, because it sells well, which makes it sell well. But in success-orientated American culture this isn’t the absurd tautology it seems to be, at least not once a brand is on a roll.

According to Grahm in order for the [yellow tail] wines to gain their massive sales momentum in the US market there was, „an unholy amount of money being spent throughout the he distribution system to insure their ubiquity.“ However, he doesn’t claim that their omnipresence alone was the cause of the meteoric rise of this and other new wine megabrands, rather that it was a necessary precondition for it. „The formula for success seems to be to present a package that is visually arresting, catchy, or edgy, a wine with an „attitude,“ and then to orchestrate a highly aggressive marketing campaign…“

Grahm knew what he was talking about for in the same year as he gave this lecture he sold his two biggest wine brands Big House (blended red, white and rosé wines) and Cardinal Zin (a red from the Zinfandel grape) to The Wine Group for an undisclosed sum. Rumours suggested that the price was a serious double digit million dollar sum, and just a couple of months back other rumours suggested that Grahm unloaded his Pacific Rim brand (mostly whites from the Riesling grape) to Banfi for a similar pile of millions. That’s almost [yellow tail] scale profits!

So maybe it shouldn’t surprise us that Grahm is filled with awe for [yellow tail], though it’s a creepy kind of awe in the way that an independent filmmaker’s admiration for a Hollywood blockbuster can only be creepy, beause fiundamentally he hates that kind of movie. Grahm can’t help admiring Casella for, „starting with essentially no base, no history, no connection to a narrowly defined geographical locale – except of course the iconic Australian continent and its own icon, the kangaroo,“ yet making the product spectacularly successful in the marketplace. For Grahm, „its real real punch is its unabashed Australian-ness, which in the American fantasy is the antidote to Frenchness.“ Pas de {queue jaune}!

When it comes to wine Frenchness suggests to American consumers (and those in many other countries) labels with complex and unpronouncable geographical designations efforltessly pronounced by snooty waiters and sales staff who make the uninitiated consumer feel foolish and inferior. Then there are those prices, which seomtimes belong in the luxury goods league: ouch! And don’t forget that until Sarkozy became President in 2007 France seemed to be not only anti-American, but had also done a bunch of ugly stuff like continuing to test nuclear weapons in the South Pacific, then blowing up the Greenpeace protesters boat ‘Rainbow Warrior’ in Auckland Harbour on July 10th 1985. That last step lead to boycotts of French wines in several countries.

In contrast, throughout the Western World Australia’s image is of an unspoiled outback full of cute fauna and mystical aborigines, plus great surfing beaches like Bondi populated by girls and boys who just wanna’ have fun. People right across the class and income spectrum have bought into this double-myth of the magical land of Oz, also because that’s the way Australia has sold istelf to us as a holiday destination. All the Australian wine industry needed to do to promote their wines was put some lush green vineyards into the middle distance of this richly-coloured landscape, then set up a barbecue at the front. That most Australians see their own country totally differently is almost completely unknown to people elsewhere on Planet Wine, and therefore in no way disturbs the seductive power of this mirage. „No worries!“ as they say in the magical land of Oz. [yellow tail] is all that in vinous form; an elixir of youth from the oldest continent!

Stuart Pigott

Recommended additional reading:

‘Been Doon So Long’ by Randall Grahm (2009, University of California Press, Berkeley)

This weekend the German wine scene meets in Berlin to taste the new vintage of the VDP producers „Grosse Gewächse“, the new elite dry wines of Germany. However, they only make up a tiny and rather expensive part of the wine market. In The [yellow tail] Saga I tell the extraordinary story of one of the world’s biggest selling wines. Episode 2 follows on Thursday, September 8^th. Watch this space!

I [yellow tail] therefore I am

I used to naively believe that we wine journalists were like film critics and felt good about myself because of that, beaus since my childhood I’ve been obsessed with film. Then I realized that I was living a lie. How did that feel? Very Uncomfortable. You see, film critics normally write about everything from alternative movies to Hollywood blockbusters, but we wine journalists avoid writing about the best-sellering wines, as if were worried we might catch something infectious from them! Our obsession with „superior“ and „authentic“ wines not only deprives our readers of vital information, but also blinds us to the fact that we live in a world dominated by huge companies and global brands. I was reminded of this the other day when I read read that Apple Inc. had just became number one supplier of smartphones to the world – iphone therefore I am – as well as market leader in tablet computers – ipad therefore I am – with a sizeable chunk of the worldwide notebook computers and PC sales – imac therefore I am. Of course, we wine journalists realise that Apple’s huge, but we are in denial when it comes to this phenomenon on Planet Wine.

Something which helps us get away with this is the fact that, almost nobody has heard of Casella Wines, although they are producers of [yellow tail] – yes it is written like that all in lower case with square brackets around the name – the fastest growing wine brand the world has ever seen. In contrast to his ubiquitous product, John Casella, the managing director of Casella Wines in Yenda/Australia is almost invisible in the Australian and international media. Partly, this is because he doesn’t get up on stage at press conferences and do the kind of meaningful arm waving that has made Steve Jobs a marketing legend. In fact, Casella keeps a low profile. This has helped us wine journalists to dodge the subject of [yellow tail], but before we dig deeper into this fascinating brand, let’s backtrack and get a bit of perspective on the whole wine thing.

Given that the global wine industry has enjoyed a long boom which began during the 1980s (only briefly interrupted by various economic crises) it might seem too obvious to need pointing out, but you really can make money selling wine. However, as people who make their livings by doing so keep on pointing out to me, there are many much easier ways of making money than selling wine. There are well-established routes to Big Money like the oil and gas business and more modern ones like selling marijauna. Of course, with the former you need to strike oil or gas to make it, and for the latter to come off you have to avoid being caught by the police. But hey, playing the stock market isn’t so easy unless there’s a bull market, or at least a bubble, as inummerable investors recently found out to their (often enormous) cost. Maybe wine is actually a better choice?

Unfortunately, an old wine industry saying goes, „if you want to make a small fortune with wine, then start out with a large one.“ The first reason for this is that wine binds a lot of capital – all those barrels and tanks and the wine slowly maturing indside them, before we even göance at vineyards which take three years from planting to a full crop – and thus leads to inventory and investments which make accountants’ hair stand up on end. John Casella seems to have pulled off the miracle of starting out with very little capital, yet made a large fortune selling wine. Now that makes him, his company and his brand a great  wine story in my book.

The only serious objection I can see to covering it is the argument that [yellow tail] is of too little relevence to the German wine market, which it is often claimed ticks very differently to other markets around Planet Wine. However, according to AC Nielsen, last year sales of [yellow tail] in Germany grew 12%, making it by far the dominant Australian wine brand in Germany with 25% of the entire market for Australian wine in this country by sales and 33% by turnover. And it achieved that growth with a typical retail price of 4,99 Euros a bottle, which is slightly more than double the average price of wine sold in Germany! Sure [yellow tail] is not as huge here as it is in America, where it is easily the biggest imported wine brand, but this comparison only serves to make clear that [yellow tail] is in the process of achieving the same kind of world domination for wine that Apple Inc. is in the consumer electronics market. More extraordinarily still it did this way quicker than Apple Inc. This year [yellow tail] celebrates the tenth anniversary of its launch on the US market, whereas the first Apple Macintosh personal computer, the effective begining of the company’s current brand, went on the market back in 1984.

Once my co-author Esther Moriarty and I started researching [yellow tail] and the Casellas we started wondering what there was that this wine doesn’t connect with. There’s no way all of this can be packed into one neat little story, so we broke the greatest untold saga of wine into ?? bite-sized portions to make it more digestible. And when we did that we discovered that this made it more fun to gave it suspense. Watch [this space!]

Stuart Pigott