Here's a story that is reminiscent of Henry Ford's mass-marketing the Model-T. [yellow tail] is the unpretentious wine that has become the hot supermarket wine du jour, reports the New York Times and it shows yet again that there's money to be made in serving the popular taste.

The label is undoubtedly part of the story: any wine drinker has seen the pseudo-Aboriginal painting of a wallaby (an animal that is a smaller cousin of the kangaroo) and that identifies the wine as an Australian product. But it doesn't come from the regions like the Barossa and Hunter valleys that typically produce the best Australian wines. It comes from the Riverina, which is eumpehized as "Southeastern Australia" on the label. It was a semi-arid area that was watered by irrigation projects and now grows a wide a variety of fruits.

But the big secret of selling 7.5 million cases this year from only 60,000 five years ago, is that it's a wine that appeals to a lot of people because of its easy taste and easy price. The success has turned the small Australian winery into a large company and made a suburban-New York wine distributor a big player as well. And it's almost totally an export product. Very little yellow tail is sold in Australia.

The secret of their success is that the wine quality is consistent from year-to-year and the product fills that niche - or very big space - between $20 a bottle and jug wines.