Link > Griffith City Council Website About Griffith extract of BRW 19/5/2005
Nestled among the big tanks of the Casella winery at Griffith in south western New South Wales is a modest family home. It is where Filippo and Maria Casella, 84 and 79, raised their children Rosa, John, Joe and Marcello and where they founded the business that, with its Yellow Tail brand, has had spectacular success in the United States. In 2004, only three years after Yellow Tail was introduced to the market, the Casellas have sold more than eight million cases in the US, and Casella is now the second largest winery in Australia. The family has amassed a fortune of $600 million.
Filippo and Maria, who migrated to Australia in the 1950s, have refused to move to more salubrious quarters. Why would they? Their sons and grandson work in the business, and their home is a reminder of the central role of the family.
The Cassellas’ story is a heritage shared by many families around Griffith. The town has a population of about 24,000 but it is home to four clans on the BRW Rich 200. As well as the Casellas, there are the McWilliam and De Bortoli wine dynasties and the Bartter brothers, Peter and David, who own Bartter Enterprises, the second-largest chicken meat producer in Australia. Their good fortune has rubbed off on many in the town. The tree-lined main street of Griffith, Banna Avenue, is dotted with late-model BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes. Cafes, restaurants and fashion boutiques are buzzing. In the town, designed by Walter Burley Griffin, locals can expect to pay about $300,000 for a three-bedroom home on a suburban-size block, comparable to some suburbs of Melbourne. Four return air flights to Sydney each day are often at capacity. Money for new development is still flowing into the town, hardware retailers Bunnings and Magnetmart have just opened super stores and a new shopping centre is to be built next year by the Peninsula Group. In the 10 years to 2001, the gross regional product of Griffith rose by 4.2% a year, reaching $798 million in 2001. The mayor, John Dal Broi, says the town owes its prosperity to the hard-working migrants who have been settling there since early last century. Dal Broi’s father, an Italian immigrant, was one of many who left his country of birth with nothing. “It’s a boom town because of bloody hard work,” he says. “The Italians were dirt poor and flat out feeding themselves so they sponsored each other to come here. And while there wasn’t much here either, if you worked hard you could be successful>” The first European settlers arrived to blistering heat of 45 degrees and a puny 400 millimetres of rain a year. In 1912 the Murrumbidgee irrigation scheme was opened, bringing water to the area through rivers and man-made channels. Land was allocated to returned World War One soldiers and later bought by migrants, and the semi-arid plains were transformed into lush rice fields, bountiful orchards and vineyards. Griffith – a day’s drive from Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne – became an oasis in the desert. The region’s big industries are wine, rice, citrus growing and poultry farming. Doug McWilliam’s great-grandfather John James McWilliam was the first to plan wine grapes in the area in 1913. Doug says: “The first year they had to water them by hand from a dam until the water came down from the irrigation system a year later>” At 57, he is part of the fifth generation to work in the wine business. His two children are the sixth. Vittorio De Bortoli, the founder of De Bortoli Wines, was among the first wave of Italian migrants to the region in the 1920s. His son, Deen, who joined the business as a 15-year-old in 1952, was the visionary who expanded capacity to 110 vats, holding about 3.6 million litres, by 1959. This was well before there was much of an Australian market for table wine, except among immigrants. Under Deen, until his death in 2003, and since then under his children Darren, Leanne, Kevin and Victor, De Bortoli has become the nation’s second-largest family-owned wine company and has expanded into the premium grape growing regions of the Yarra, King and Hunter valleys. Next door to the McWilliam’s winery at Hanwood in Griffith is Bartter Enterprises, a huge meat processing plant. Peter Bartter, 68, founded the company in 1955. Leaning across his desk in his impressive office, he opens his original project book, its yellowed pages full of neatly typed rows of figures. “That’s the first batch of chickens I ever reared, as an 18-year-old,?” he says. “One hundred chicks under an electric light bulb.” Bartter Enterprises, which acquired Steggles from Goodman Fielder for $1312 million in 1999, is now the biggest employer in town.
A Vine Romance It is the wine industry that has expanded most dramatically in the past decade, fuelling much of Griffith’s recent good fortune. The wine export boom that started in the early 1990s prompted citrus farmers, fed up with shrinking margins for their produce, and rice farmers struggling to stay viable with reduced water allocations, to switch to grapes or sell their land to the viticulturists. McWilliam’s, Miranda and De Bortoli expanded, and new wineries such as Nugan Estate and Zappacosta Estate emerged. The best example of local expansion is Casella Wines, which has increased production from 2000 to 120,000 tonnes in 10 years to meet demand for the Yellow Tail varieties in export markets. At harvest time a steady stream of trucks laden with grapes from South Australia and Victoria arrive to feed the growing winery’s appetite. The trucks used to travel in the other direction, but now all the value-adding is happening in Griffith and the local region is reaping the benefits.
Filippo’s son, John Casella, is managing director and the driving force behind the company. He has installed five new presses, three centrifuges and more than 60 million litres of storage capacity. The winery can pump out up to 30,000 bottles an hour, and two more production lines are about to be built. John Casella is modest about how much his company means to Griffith. “I think we’ve had a fairly big impact. I don’t know what the multiplier effect is, but last year, between local grapes, wages and contractors, I reckon we contributed about $50 million to the town.” Casella says the family’s lifestyle has not changed because all their profit has been invested in development. “We haven’t paid a dollar in dividends since we started the business.” The wineries have helped other businesses grow. A&G Industries was founded by Ron Potter and Lionel Irving in the early 1960s as an agricultural service centre. Potter began to design and build win-making equipment. The company started working for local wineries, and has since become an exporter, turning over more than $50 million a year. It employs 120 skilled locals.  Family Ties Griffith is still a small town, and family connections matter. Darren De Bortoli says: “You tend to be closer to some companies than others. Maybe that’s because you are more of a similar mindset.” In some ways he laments the growth of the town. “The earlier generation was closer … The industry is becoming more corporate.” And he is right. The Miranda family sold their winery business to ASX-listed McGuigan Simeon Wines for $25.5 million in September 2003. Orlando Wyndham, a subsidiary of French company Pernod Ricard, has one of its seven wineries in Griffith. There is a lot of strength in family. You can rely on people and you can bounce ideas off people. John Casella Yet John Casella would not do business any other way than through a family company. “There is a lot of strength in family. You can rely on people, and you can bounce ideas off people who are like-minded.” He attributes the region’s success to the friendly rivalry. “There is a lot of competition among people. They effectively set examples for each other. In this town, we have lots of land, capital is available, and there are people with initiative willing to take advantage of it.” Like many areas of Australia, the town’s growth has been held back by a lack of skilled workers. There has been a steady stream of migrants into the region – after the Italians came Fijians, Tongans, Filipinos, Indians and most recently Afghanis. But all the big businesses in town say filling positions is hard, and for those that wish to grow, the situation is critical. Peter Bartter says he would have grown organically – and not bought Steggles – if he could have hired more local labour. “We were considering doubling our size here in Griffith and going to 1.2 million chicken production a week. We would have had needed another 1000 people, we would have needed two workers to art every week for 10 years. We would have failed.” High property prices, a high cost of living and distance from the big cities are all drawbacks for potential employees. Bartter says that when people come to Griffith they struggle to save money and buy a house. John Casella says he has found it “near impossible” to find all the staff he needs. “We advertise Australia-wide and have looked at getting tradespeople from places such as South Africa. It’s fairly important to keep the labour market balanced and I think we may have a wages explosion.” The other big issue for Griffith is water. Because the region is irrigated, many of the growers have been insulated from the worst effects of the rough. Nevertheless, a shortage of water threatens growers of rice and other annual crops because their water allocations are not guaranteed. These farmers were allocated a mere 18% of their full entitlement at the beginning of this year. In April, the allocation was increased, but for many it was too late. Without security of water supply they cut back plantings substantially. Geoff Hopkins, the chief executive of Murrumbidgee Irrigation, says this year’s rice crop will probably be about 100,000 tonnes, “about 20% of the normal figure”. The drought will eventually break, but there is increasing political pressure to divert water from irrigation to Australia’s river systems. It is a dark spot on an otherwise bright future for the region. Peter Bartter says: “The future of Griffith is pretty well assured with the industries that are here. Griffith is one of the few country towns that is growing and that is because of the water. Water built it. {But} if they take the water away, it will shrink. It will come to a stop. And that would be a crying shame.”

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