The Day a 1960 Gemello Cabernet Came Alive
The unforgettable experience of a meticulously aged California cabernet.
Welcome to a newsletter themed at the intersection of longevity and wine history. 🍷
This is a story from the archives. It originally ran in April 2025.
Longtime East Coast wine importer Dan Kravitz remembers the day he discovered one of his favorite wines: a 1960 Gemello Cabernet Sauvignon. It was about 50 years ago. He was in Silicon Valley visiting friends who had recently relocated to the West Coast. They took him on a tour of Santa Cruz Mountains wineries, which ended with a stop at the Gemello Winery in Mountain View.
“It was behind the bowling alley,” he remembers referring to the Camino Bowl, a landmark on El Camino Real for almost a half century, almost as long as the winery. My grandfather, Mario Gemello, helped his father launch the winery in 1934, a month after Prohibition. He was 17 and still in high school.
Fans of Gemello wines would buy bottles and cases in the on-site liquor store. That’s how Kravitz wound up there, striking up a conversation with the salesman, who told Kravitz something that surprised him.
“He said the 1960 Gemello Cabernet will age as well as just about any red Bordeaux. It was autographed. It read, ‘Made by me, Mario Gemello’,” Kravitz told me in a phone interview recently.
Some of the best red wines from the Bordeaux region of France are known to last 50 years or more.
“He said the 1960 Gemello Cabernet will age as well as just about any red Bordeaux. It was autographed. It read, ‘Made by me, Mario Gemello’,” said Dan Kravitz.
My grandfather has said 1960 was a turning point for the Gemello Winery. A few years earlier, he had brought on the Sarto brothers, Louis and Boise, as partners. Boise, a creative mind from the advertising industry, designed the Gemello logo, which first appeared on the 1960 vintage bottles.
In the early 1990s, Mario Gemello told wine journalist Charles Sullivan the 1960 Cabernet was “one of our first outstanding wines.”1 The grapes came from a vineyard on Pierce Road in Saratoga planted by Martin Ray.
“It sloped around, with a morning sun exposure - it was really one of the best cabernet vineyards in the area,” said Gemello in a 2002 interview after the 1970 Gemello Cabernet won the Judgment of Paris blind tasting re-enactment.2
The 1960 was aged for 10 years in neutral puncheons (midsize oak casks) before bottling.
It was important for the family to set it at a price point of $3.25, accessible for most American wine drinkers, according to Gemello’s niece Sandy Obester, who acquired the Gemello wine label upon her uncle’s retirement in 1982. She and her husband Paul also owned the Obester Winery (1977 - 2002) in Half Moon Bay.
There were “long family discussions about keeping the price low so everyone can enjoy the wine,” Obester said.
2005: Sandy Obester and her husband Paul at Mario Gemello’s 89th birthday party.
Kravitz, who lives in Maine, has preserved his 1960 Gemello Cabernet in his cellar among 700 other wine bottles, for 50 years. That was until a winter day in 2010. That’s when he put the bottle to the test. Kravitz uncorked it, enjoying the 50-year-old bottle with some friends. Recalling what the Gemello salesman told him in the 1970s when he bought the bottle, Kravitz said he wasn’t misinformed about the wine’s longevity.
“It’s one of the great wines of my life,” Kravitz said.
Tri-State Wine Lovers Unite Around a Gemello Cabernet
Kravitz raved about the experience on WineBerserkers, an online discussion forum and wine community, catching the attention of Sarah Kirschbaum, a wine collector based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She and her husband Jonathan Read, have collected Gemello wines since at least the 2000s.
Back then, Read worked at Zachys wine auctions. The job allowed him to travel the country visiting many of the great wine collectors.
“It was the California collectors that had most of these old California time capsules, particularly when you were able to get into the old San Francisco collections,” Read said. “There’s one collector that is quite well-known named John Tilson, a longtime champion of Gemello.”
Tilson’s been publishing a popular wine newsletter called The Underground Wineletter for more than 40 years.
When Kravitz would reference his love for Gemello wine on WineBerserker, Kirschbaum would frequently suggest getting together to enjoy one of their last remaining 1960 bottles from the mixed case her husband had purchased at an auction.
This went on for five years, until finally a date was set for lunch. Kravitz and his girlfriend made a road trip from Maine to Philadelphia. Another friend of Read and Kirschbaum flew in from Florida.
c. 1975: Mario Gemello
The four-and-a-half-hour lunch of grilled Atlantic mackerel, started with a magnum of Diebolt-Vallois Champagne ‘Prestige,’ followed by a 1996 Huet Demi-sec, among a few other wines.
At the tail end, Read and Kirschbaum brought out the 1960 Gemello Cabernet. It was opened and allowed to breathe for 30 minutes before being decanted. It was paired with pan-seared veal chops with chanterelle mushrooms, pearl onions, and hakurei turnips as the main dish.
“After talking about this lunch for years, to have it finally come together and having the Gemello (our last bottle) show so perfectly, made us very happy,” Kirschbaum wrote on the message board.
Kravitz described it as being “otherworldly.”
“Imagine an absolutely perfect medium-bodied Cabernet of infinite subtlety and celestial beauty, redolent with a cornucopia of black and red fruits, totally weightless,” Kravitz wrote on WineBerserker. “That’s what was in my glass. [The] 1960 Gemello is the best Cabernet I’ve ever had from California.”
If you’re new here—hi, I’m Kevin!
I’m the author of 🍷 Rain on the Monte Bello Ridge,🍷 my forthcoming memoir about health, aging and winemaking. (Read the origin story of the book.) 🍇
The Centenarian Playbook is my newsletter, which features:
Healthy aging/longevity tips and stories from Grandma Kay’s long life.
Wine history & stories of the Gemello Winery
Ancestry & family research tips
There are three buttons at the bottom of every post: “like,” “comment,” and “restack.” Restacking is sharing in digital form. It goes out to the Substack community. If you enjoy the content and click “Restack,” it helps a lot.
Sullivan, Charles, Wines & Winemakers of the Santa Cruz Mountains, An Oral History, 1992 - 1994 (D.R. Bennion Trust Fund)
“The Greatest Wine You’ve Never Heard Of,” by Ray Isle, Wine & Spirits Magazine, June 2002
I'll see! Thanks Phil. I appreciate it!
Kevin. You are a great writer. Also a very nice person. Do you have a bottle of this special wine for me