From grapes grown for others to a bottled brand of its own.

[yellow tail] — the brand writes its name in lower case between square brackets, English Wikipedia notes, citing the company’s own site — belongs to Casella Family Brands, a family-owned wine company based in Yenda, New South Wales. The company says Filippo and Maria Casella emigrated to Australia from Sicily in 1957. English Wikipedia, citing the company website, says they bought land in New South Wales in 1965 and at first grew grapes for local winemakers, and that the family began making its own wine in 1969, the year Casella gives as its founding.

For three decades the Yenda winery was largely a supplier of wine in bulk. The company says their son John Casella joined the business in 1995 and led its expansion; English Wikipedia named him managing director in 2023. According to the company history cited by English Wikipedia, [yellow tail] was developed in 2000 as a way to move from bulk wine into a bottled brand of the family’s own.

The launch market was not Australia but the United States. Casella partnered with W. J. Deutsch & Sons, a family-owned American importer, in 2000, and the wine reached American shelves in 2001. VinePair reported in 2015 that the brand sold about 200,000 cases in its first year and about 2.2 million cases the year after. Its rise quickly became a case study: the wine economist Mike Veseth wrote in The Wine Economist in 2008 that in 2005 [yellow tail] sold more wine in the United States than all French producers combined, and English Wikipedia, citing VinePair, says it was the number-one imported wine in the US in 2011. The business book Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne (Harvard Business School Press, 2005) also discusses the brand.

A rock-wallaby, square brackets and a colour for every grape.

The name and the emblem come from the same animal. English Wikipedia says the brand is named after the yellow-footed rock-wallaby, a marsupial native to inland Australia, and the wallaby, which the company calls the “Roo,” is the figure on the label. The other constant is typographic: the name set in lower case inside square brackets, so that the brackets themselves act as part of the mark.

Colour does the sorting on the shelf. The trade magazine B&T reported in 2013, in a story headed “Yellow Tail gets colourful,” on a range in which each grape variety carries its own label colour.

In March 2025 Casella announced what it called the brand’s first packaging refresh in over 20 years. The company’s release described a more dynamic, redrawn Roo, a gold Roo and a cork for the Sparkling Cuvée, and a new global brand toolkit for markets around the world, and quoted Arina Serra, the company’s global senior brand manager. Packaging News reported in March 2025 that the redesign was by Design Bridge and Partners in Singapore.

The brand’s advertising has passed through several agencies. AdNews and Campaign Brief reported in 2019 that the Sydney agency Marcel had been appointed to handle [yellow tail]’s global creative work, and AdNews reported in April 2024 that the agency isobel had won the brand’s account in the United Kingdom.

The wallaby has also been defended in court. Casella sued The Wine Group over its Little Roo wine in the Southern District of New York in October 2010, and the case was settled in August 2011, Law360 reported.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all wine and sake names: Yellow Tail, Jacob’s Creek, Penfolds, Casillero del Diablo, Concha y Toro, Barefoot and Gekkeikan. Wine and sake brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from family houses that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a restaurant list.

A wine or sake brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its wine or sake is actually made and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its wine or sake is made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

One brand, and the family company that grew around it.

Casella has since grown beyond a single brand. Wine Spectator reported in November 2014 that Casella had bought the Barossa winery Peter Lehmann; the Coonawarra producer Brand’s Laira followed in December 2015, The Advertiser reported, and in July 2016 Casella bought the fortified-wine maker Morris of Rutherglen from Pernod Ricard Winemakers, the owner at the time of Jacob’s Creek, Wine Business Monthly reported. The brand itself stretched beyond wine in February 2016, when The Drinks Business reported the launch of a [yellow tail] lager in the US.

Size brought choices about land. In November 2022 Casella sold about 7,000 hectares of vineyards across 35 properties to the Canadian pension investor PSP Investments, Wine Business Monthly and the Australian Financial Review reported, while the family kept its winemaking and brands. Winetitles’ annual ranking published in 2023 placed Casella third among Australian wine companies by production in 2022. The brand marked its 20th birthday in 2021.

The name needs a little care online. “Yellowtail” is also the common name of several fish, including the Japanese amberjack served as sushi; the wine brand’s own site is yellowtailwine.com.

For a design guide, [yellow tail] shows how a single animal, a pair of square brackets and a colour code by grape can carry a wine brand from a Riverina winery to shelves around the world for more than two decades. Compare Penfolds, the South Australian winery behind Grange, and Barefoot, the Californian wine brand. For this guide we use wallaby yellow, ochre and label black with a bold sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep [yellow tail]’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.