Digital Wine Ventures (DW8 ASX) owned WINEDEPOT are pleased to announce that Casella Family Brands’ portfolio of iconic Australian wine brands have signed on as a customer of the integrated logistics, trading and order management platform.

Casella Family Brands is Australia’s largest and most successful family owned wine business. Each year the group crushes between 160,000 and 200,000 tonnes of fruit making them the second largest wine producer in Australia1. Casella Family Brands also operates a number of regional wineries throughout Australia.

Under the agreement WINEDEPOT will manage the fulfillment of Casella Family Brands’ entire product portfolio across a range of domestic channels. The portfolio includes a number of iconic Australian wine brands:

· [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.”

“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.” says Taylor.

Flaminio Dondina, Casella Family Brands’ General Manager of Procurement/Distribution/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.”

WINEDEPOT confirms several other smaller scale wineries now using their services

The company is also pleased to announce 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

Digital Wine Ventures CEO Dean 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.”

‘”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.”