FOR the past 70 years Ernest and Julio Gallo, along with their heirs, have been telling the same stirring story about the foundation of the wine company that bears their name. It goes something like this.

In 1933, the two Italian-American brothers were destitute after the sudden deaths of both their parents but decided to put what meagre resources they had - $900, plus another $5,000 they borrowed from a relative - into a new business they knew next to nothing about.

They had never made or sold wine but felt boundlessly confident that there had to be a market for it because Prohibition, the 14year puritan experiment that spawned an epidemic of criminality without doing much to dull Americans' taste for alcohol, was coming to an end.

Ernest found a dusty pamphlet on winemaking in the basement of a library at the University of California in Davis and together the brothers plunged into the new venture, unafraid of working long hours and building up the business slowly and painstakingly over a period of decades. In due time, they built up the biggest, most profitable wine company in the US, dominating almost half of the California market at their zenith and generating Euro2.2bn in sales in 2005, the last year for which figures are available. They still claim to be the world's biggest wine-seller by volume.

The forgotten Gallo A few things about the story, though, have never added up. For a start, there was a third Gallo brother, Joseph, who was 10 years younger than Ernest and Julio and somehow never managed to get into business with them on an equal footing. Then there is a plethora of evidence that Ernest and Julio did not start the business from scratch at all, but rather took over an existing, largely clandestine operation that their father had started in 1909 and had continued in one form or another even after the production of alcohol (for anything other than religious or medicinal purposes) was made illegal in 1919.

In the past 20 years, another, more sinister narrative has emerged to challenge the official version, one that paints Ernest and Julio not as ideal embodiments of the American dream but rather as cynical, boundlessly ambitious entrepreneurs who deliberately burnished a myth about their origins that covered up some unpalatable secrets about the family's past and also served to cut their younger brother out of the inheritance that might have been his.

Ernest, in particular, emerges from this version of events as a Machiavellian figure - sometimes nicknamed L'Avvocato, the Italian word for lawyer, and sometimes nicknamed The Godfather.

Joseph, the forgotten Gallo, came to regard himself as the male equivalent of Cinderella battling her evil stepsisters - downtrodden and worked to the bone as a young man, a role he accepted willingly at the time, only to be spurned when he tried to claim what he believed to be rightfully his.

Joseph, or Joe, battled for much of the latter part of his life to correct the record and claim his full share of the family fortune.

But it was a battle he would never win.

This week, he died at the age of 87 after years of ill health and mental degeneration that he blamed squarely on the trials - literal and figurative - he had been put through by his brothers.

Conmen and bootleggers In the 1980s, Ernest and Julio took him to court in a case of astonishing nastiness, alleging that he had no right to use the Gallo name in a cheese-selling venture he had set up on his own. They publicly derided his cheese as "garbage" and a potential health hazard, and claimed that the only reason Joe had not become a partner in their wine business decades earlier was because he had not wanted to. Joe was so wounded that he never spoke to them again.

Ernest and Julio won their case after a federal judge agreed that Joe was indeed attempting to derive financial gain from his brothers' name and reputation. And they successfully fended off a counter-suit in which Joe demanded a one-third share of their fortune; the same judge said he did not have the means to determine who was telling the truth about events 50 years before.

It was the culmination of an astonishing family saga revealing the often sordid underbelly of American capitalism. Ernest always maintained that a winemaker was a "warrior" and he adopted that attitude in his unflagging efforts to market the Gallo name from one end of north America to the other.

There was never much about the company that suggested real feeling for its products other than its ability to shift them in huge quantities. Ernest also talked about selling wine the way Campbell sells soup - an ambition he certainly realised but not without incurring certain costs.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Gallo wine became a byword for cheap junk, not least because its jugs were often gulped down by homeless drunks on America's big-city streets.

The company was targeted by Cesar Chavez's farmworkers' union over the treatment of its grape-pickers, investigated by the federal government for its allegedly unethical business practices and derided by counter-culture students at the University of California's Berkeley campus who mounted a mock trial of the Gallos and declared them guilty of "crimes against the people".

An unauthorised biography of the family published in 1993 claimed that the E & J Gallo Winery had engaged in such questionable activities as dumping cigarette butts in its competitors' bottles and then resealing them. Down the years, they were investigated by the feds for allegedly adding illicit dyes to their wines and adding banned caramel to their brandies.

The biography, Blood and Wine, by Ellen Hawkes, also blew sky-high the family myth about the Gallos - demonstrating, with historical and legal documentation, that the brothers' parents and uncle had worked as conmen and bootleggers both before and during Prohibition; that Ernest and Julio learned the wine trade first from their maternal grandparents and then from their father;

and that the entire family was plagued with bitter feuding.

Joe Gallo snr, the boys' father, worked them so hard, and for so little reward, that they came to him in 1930 with an ultimatum and demanded to be made his partners. Joe snr chased them away from his ranch with a shotgun and it took two months and considerable intervention by other family members to coax them back to California's Central Valley. Joe snr treated his wife, Susie, so brutally that she initiated divorce proceedings against him twice early on in their marriage.

Then, in June 1933, Joe snr cracked completely, shot his wife in the back of the head and then turned the .32 calibre Smith & Wesson pistol on himself.

The younger Joe, who was 12 at the time, did not discover the truth for years.

Rather, he was told only that they had died in a terrible accident.

Later, the brothers would tell people their parents had died of pneumonia, or flu. Ernest and Julio became Joe's guardians, and treated him much as their father had treated them - forcing him to do hours of farm work before he went to school and again after he returned home and refusing to bring him in on their business enterprise. Joe believed the story about starting the company from scratch, and unquestioningly signed every document Ernest and Julio passed his way - including one, in 1944, that turned out to be a consent form granting full powers of attorney to them.

Joe eventually went off on his own and developed a lucrative business as a rancher. (The cheese business came much later. ) He was not the only family member to be cut out of the growing success of the Gallo winery.

Their uncle Mike, who had lived high on the hog during Prohibition as a sort of West Coast Al Capone until the feds got to him, was reduced to living in a trailer home in Las Vegas and working as a short-order cook. The only consideration Ernest and Julio ever gave him was to send him occasional crates of Gallo wine.

Ernest and Julio never wanted to admit the extent of their family's involvement in criminal activities during Prohibition for fear of what it might do to their reputations. "What [people] didn't realise was that Mike's past was more than just an embarrassment, " Hawkes wrote.

"His adventures in bootlegging and his knowledge of the activities of his brother contradicted the family's official history. Mike's stories would have undermined the legend of the two brothers creating their winery from nothing." Perhaps the best evidence that Ernest and Julio had continued their family business rather than creating their own comes from a statement Ernest gave in a lawsuit in 1949 in which he acknowledges the family history.

Wine is thicker than blood "The name of the brand has been used since 1909 by the rest of my family, that is, my father, " he said according to the official transcript. "We used Gallo in conjunction with grapes during Prohibition. Our company, the E & J Gallo Winery, then continued with the brand in 1933 when we started the business."

From Joe's point of view, his two brothers had perpetrated a gigantic fraud that denied him his share of their parents' inheritance. When the cheesemaking lawsuit hit in the 1980s, he felt he was being further deprived of his very name. (His Joseph Gallo Farms label was later renamed Joseph Farms, and remained successful. ) His son Mike observed: "Ernest always told us blood is thicker than water. But what he really believes is that wine is thicker than blood." Joe suffered a series of strokes in the wake of the lawsuit and never properly recovered his health. Julio died in 1993, in a car accident on one of his ranches, while Ernest is still alive, aged 98, and is, to judge by his official autobiography, still convinced his brother Joe betrayed him rather than the other way around. The winery, meanwhile, continues to grow, diversifying into higher-end "reserve" wines as well as the cheaper mass-market bottles.

"Family comes first, " Ernest Gallo has often been quoted saying. But for all the riches the Gallos have accumulated, they have also managed to split themselves asunder. The past 75 years have seen a murder-suicide, another suicide (of Julio's son Philip in the 1950s), the disowning of Uncle Mike and the lawsuit pitting brother against brother. Some family.