Casella Family Brands’ iconic Australian wine brand portfolio has signed on as a customer of the integrated logistics, trading and order management platform, WineDepot.
Australia’s largest family-owned wine business, Casella Family Brands crushes between 160,000 and 200,000 tonnes of fruit a year, making it the second largest wine producer in Australia.
Casella Family Brands also operates a number of regional wineries throughout Australia.
Under the agreement, WineDepot will manage Casella Family Brands’ entire product portfolio across a range of domestic channels including:
• [yellow tail] Wine
• Casella Family Wines
• Peter Lehmann Wines
• Brand’s Laira Coonawarra
• The Magic Box Wine Collection
• Morris of Rutherglen
• Baileys of Glenrowan
Digital Wines CEO Dean Taylor believes that the agreement with Casella Family Brands validates the need for a disruptive supply chain solution such as WineDepot.
“Casella’s Yenda winery site covers a working area of 95 acres and can store over 260 million litres of wine. At the other end of the spectrum, we also work with micro producers who hand make just a few hundred cases of wine per year,” he said.
“What this shows is that our platform caters for wine businesses of almost any scale. Having that degree of product market fit at this stage in our business cycle is very exciting.”
Flaminio Dondina, Casella Family Brands’ general manager of procurement, distribution and strategy, believes that WineDepot will provide several important measurable benefits to the company.
“WineDepot’s network and technology offering perfectly complements our domestic distribution model with a reliable solution for small deliveries. Due to the scale of our business and the number of regional wineries under the Casella Family Brands’ umbrella, this partnership will add significant value to our organisation by reducing complexity, increasing operational efficiencies and improving delivery times. We look forward to a successful and long-term partnership with WineDepot,” they said.
The company announced that several smaller scale wineries have also been signed up as customers of WineDepot.
Early adopters include wineries from leading Australian wine regions such as the Adelaide Hills, Coonawarra, McLaren Vale and include:
• Redman Wines
• Brown Hill Wines
• Gatch Wine
• Maan Wines
Taylor notes that the take up rate of customers to date is in line with expectations.
“We always knew that launching just prior to Christmas would have its challenges. For most of those in the industry, the majority of profits are generated in the spring quarter, so they tend to shy away from making operational changes during this period,” he said.
‘”The fact that we’ve had this many of the pre-registrations already convert to customers up is a great testament to the strength of the proposition that we are providing the wine industry.”
