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Casella Wines sues Bronco Wine Company
August 14, 2009
By Chris Snow in Adelaide
Yellow Tail producer, Casella Wines, is suing California's Bronco Wine Company for trademark infringement.
Casella is alleging that Bronco's use of square brackets around the name of the recently released super-cheap Down Under label infringes the '[yellow tail]' name which is trademarked.
Documents were lodged with a Manhattan Court on Thursday.
Bronco, best known for the ultra-cheap US$1.99 Charles Shaw brand - nicknamed 'Two Buck Chuck'- launched [Down Under] in July. It retails for US$2.99 a bottle.
It is wine bought from Australia's 475m litre surplus, at prices reported to be as low as 40 cents a litre compared with the average price of $3.11 a litre for Australian wine exports in 2008-09.
Bronco's chief executive, Fred Franzia, said just before the launch that he was targeting Yellow Tail, which sells 8.6m cases a year in the USA at about US$S6 a bottle, because he thought Australian wines were too expensive.
Casella Wines today issued a brief statement, saying it 'felt it necessary to take steps to protect its [yellow tail] brand in the US, which it hopes to resolve by mutual agreement.'
It did not plan to make any other comment until agreement attempts had been 'exhausted.'
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A few years ago, Veuve Cliquot famously and, after eight years, successfully took legal action to prevent other wine companies using "its" specific tone of orange (Pantone 137C, I think) on their labels. Other commercial orangeophiles, including Hermes, Easyjet and B&Q have all failed in similar efforts to protect their hues. It will be very interesting to see how Casella fares with its square brackets, but after looking at a lot of labels recently in preparation for a new edition of Art of the Wine Label a now woefully out-of-date I wrote long before Yellow Tail was even conceived, I'd say that they may have a pretty good case. Especially since the Casellas and the designer, Barbara Harkness acknowledged that the label didn't quite work until the square brackets were added. Perhaps it was the fact that they were so apparently out of place on a wine label. In any event, anyone feeling remotely sympathetic towards Bronco should remember that this is the company that spent a lot of money trying to protect its right to use the Napa Ridge label on wine made from grapes grown elsewhere in California.
Robert Joseph, UK
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