Casella Wines managing director John Casella in the sprawling winery at Yenda, near Griffith. PHOTO: SANDRA GODWIN

THE Casella family story started much like any other tale of post-war European migrants seeking a better life in a new country.

Sicilian-born Filippo arrived in Australia in 1952, followed by his wife, Maria and their two children, Rosa and Joe, in 1957.

Both had long family histories in winemaking and they chose to settle near Griffith because of its Mediterranean-style climate and popularity with other southern Italians.

Filippo continued to work as an itinerant farm worker and sugar-cane cutter in Queensland until he had saved enough money to buy a 20ha soldier settler block planted to peaches, prunes, apricots and grapes, near Yenda in 1966.

By then they had two more sons, John and Marcello, and after three years of selling grapes to other wineries, built a winery of their own in 1969. Joe and John crushed the grapes by feet for the first batch of wine.

Loaded up with 20 barrels, Filippo drove to Queensland to sell it to friends and people he'd met while on the harvest trail.

Over the next nine years, he installed a mechanical crusher, stainless steel tank and a 12-tonne fermenter.

In 1978, the Casellas released their first wine, Yendalla Spumante, on the market and developed a market for bulk and bottled wine.

John studied winemaking at Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga, then spent 12 years working for Riverina Estate Wines, now known as Warburn Estate. He returned to the family business as managing director in 1994.

That's when the Casella story took a different direction.

Aerial photos on the wall of John's utilitarian office show phases of the winery's growth as extra tanks and sheds - which now surround Maria's home - were added.

In 1994, the winery was one shed, had only half the floor cemented, an outdoor refrigeration unit, second-hand tanks and compressors salvaged from the junkyards of other wineries such as McWilliams and Rosettos, and rebuilt or re-engineered.

Casellas crushed 2000 tonnes of grapes that year.

It is now Australia's biggest family-owned winery on 60ha, it employs 727 people and crushed 170,000 tonnes of grapes from more than 30 regions this year - about 10 per cent of Australia's grapes.

Casellas packages 130 million litres of wine a year, 95 per cent of it for export. What happened in between was a combination of luck and a lot of hard work.

John determined that the company's future was in exports and signed a deal with William J Deutsch & Sons to distribute his wine in the US.

The Carramar Estate wines were deemed a flop in 1999, but John quickly regrouped and produced a new label, Yellow Tail.

"I remember when I was very young tasting wine that a local company had made and I noticed the awful characters that wine had versus what the homemade wine tasted like - soft and fruity," John said. "I always remembered how bad wine could be, so it was a matter of building the positives and reducing the negatives - not too much tannin, not too much acid, softness, suppleness, fruitiness. That way you change the broadness of appeal. We had a wine style and wine quality to build volume on and the winery was at a size, where if it wasn't a big deal it wasn't worth doing, as simple as that."

Post-Sydney Olympics, everything Australian was popular in the US, helped along by larger-than-life characters such as Steve Irwin and Paul Hogan.

"We felt the time was right to get product into a customer base 15 times the size of Australia," John said. "We thought we'd do 50,000 cases to the Americans in the first year. It was actually almost a million. The bottling line ran 24 hours a day and Hardys sold us back some of the bulk wine they'd bought. We went from being net sellers to being net buyers in that time."

With older brother Joe as domestic sales and purchasing manager and younger brother Marcello supervising Casellas' 800ha of vineyards, Alan Kennett became chief winemaker.

The Yellow Tail juggernaut that started off with a shiraz and a chardonnay rolled on with a momentum all of its own.

The already rambling winery grew again to keep up with demand, crushing 200,000 tonnes of grapes in 2008 when global sales passed 10 million cases.

The Yellow Tail range itself expanded, with the addition of a reserve range, to 16 varietals and blends in 750ml and 1.5-litre bottles.

Wine critics had a field day - dismissing the wines as cheap, mass produced and lacking craftsmanship, even as Yellow Tail continued to break production, export and sales records.

It's that sort of "nonsense" that gets John's blood up.

"Nobody should be in business to not supply what people want," he said. "If the masses want a fun, easy drinking value-for-money wine then you can't ever exclude yourself from that if you're making a profit. It's just nonsense. It's one of those myths that's gone on and on and nobody's bothered to check the facts."

With an average price of $69 a case in the US, Yellow Tail ranks higher than Lindeman ($64), Fisheye ($56) and Banrock Station ($63), but below Jacobs Creek ($76), Rosemount ($94) and Penfolds ($118).

"So we're not exactly chasing the a--- end of the market," he said.

Casella Wines also has notched up an impressive list of medals and awards for both its wines and business.

They include the 2004 Jimmy Watson memorial trophy for the 2003 Yellow Tail limited release cabernet sauvignon, at the Royal Melbourne Wine Show, and in September the 2005 Yellow Tail limited release cabernet sauvignon was named best dry red of show and awarded the grand gold medal at the International Wine Awards in Austria.

Casella Wines was Australian Agribusiness Exporter of the Year in 2002, 2003 and 2004 and was inducted into Australia's Export Awards Hall of Fame in 2005.

Yellow Tail wines won eight medals at this year's Royal Melbourne Wine Show.

John said sales had peaked about three years ago and had since plateaued to about $264 million, which was 48 per cent of wine sold in the US and 44 per cent by volume.

It's a brighter picture than for some of the Australian wine industry's biggest names, which have seen sales fall as much as 41 per cent.

And it has reinforced the company's decision to diversify into boutique beer production.

"We felt that what we do with wine, we could equally do with beer," John said. "We could work on making beer a bit more enjoyable, more approachable and, by coupling it to the winery, we could have a competitive business."

Two brews of Arvo lager were launched in June and consumers voted on social media for the one they considered The Perfect Australian Lager.

Now in more than 3000 stores, John said there had been good consumer response - though cool weather depressed sales.

The beer project is set to take off next year when Australian Beer Company, a joint venture with Coca-Cola Amatil, takes over the brewing and marketing of the company's beer products in December.

Part of the deal includes expanding the brewery to a capacity of 500,000 hectolitres.

Future plans include the launch of a premium range of wines next year - two reds and one white - in a bid to satisfy a growing demand for luxury wines and stave off the drop in exports resulting from the strong Australian dollar.