Aging Like A Fine Wine

The Mountain View Voice, the town's local newspaper, published an article about my forthcoming memoir. It highlights how winemaking & longevity coalesce within my family’s rich Mountain View history.

👋 Hello, I’m Kevin Ferguson and welcome to 🍷 Rain on the Monte Bello Ridge,🍷 a memoir about health, aging and winemaking. (Book summary) 🍇 This is my newsletter. It includes book research and early release chapters about winemaker Mario Gemello and his centenarian widow, Kay Gemello. 📖 They are my lovable maternal grandparents. You can subscribe by clicking on this handy little button.

Malea Martin, staff writer of the Voice, explores in this article how chapters of my book came to be shaped: through bonding sessions with my grandfather as we parsed through old cassette tapes of my great grandfather telling stories of winemaking during Prohibition and the Great Depression.

1980: Grandpa Mario Gemello, left (age 64) & his father John (97).

If you are new to my Substack or found out about it through the Voice, here’s a bonus. Linda Hubbard, the editor of InMenlo, published an article last year about my book’s unique Menlo Park twist; how a bond between Giovanni Beltramo and my great grandfather started in Piedmont, Italy, and was rekindled by happenstance in a San Jose watering hole in 1912.

Longtime San Francisco mid-peninsula residents may remember the Beltramo’s Wines and Spirits on El Camino Real in Menlo Park, run by generations of Beltramo family members for 134 years. It was launched in 1882 by Giovanni Beltramo as a wine store in Atherton, before expanding and moving to Menlo Park. It closed in 2016.