Rain on the Monte Bello Ridge

Moving-in day on the Ridge

👋 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.

Below is a middle chapter. Hope you enjoy it!

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Moving-in Day On the Ridge

One day in 2002, Grandpa Mario was feeling antsy. He just couldn’t wait.

I told him I’d be at his house by eleven. As I walked in through the garage of his Los Altos home at six minutes past, I noticed he had started without me. The Italian voice of my late great-grandfather was echoing through the house as if he were chatting with Mario, who was a spry eighty-six at the time. 

The voice of Great Grandpa John Gemello, who died in 1981 at the age of ninety-eight, was playing on a cassette tape recorded in the mid-seventies.

When I walked into the house, I found my grandfather scribbling on a notepad.

His eagerness to get started was partly because he was excited about this project, but also he was a stickler for promptness.

“I already got part of it down,” he said.

“Gramps, you’re wasting your time. I’ve got my laptop here. I can type twice as fast as any of us can jot notes down.”

Even though I had told him before that’s how we were going to transcribe the tapes, he still looked puzzled. He didn’t believe me. But that’s O.K. He didn’t own a computer.

In 1976, after listening to Great Grandpa tell numerous stories about  “the olden days,” Paul and Sandy Obester – my second cousins and Half Moon Bay winemakers – figured it would be valuable to get these stories on tape before he died. 

           Mario (age 64) & John Gemello (97) - 1980

The tapes were filled with stories of his life in Italy, his immigration to the United States and his days at the Almaden Vineyard near Los Gatos.

The stories stopped in 1916 when my grandfather was born in a house on Montebello Road, a stone’s throw from a handful of Santa Cruz Mountains wineries. 

That’s where I figured I would continue the research of the family history: how John Gemello persevered through Prohibition and emerged from the Great Depression as a resilient and successful businessman. 

These were traits he certainly passed down to his son Mario, who at the age of 18, helped launch the Mountain View family winery in 1934  - one month after Prohibition ended - and ran it for nearly 50 years. 

Much of my great-grandfather’s stories on the cassette tapes were difficult for me to understand because of his heavy Italian accent. So after listening to a short segment, Mario would stop the tape and interpret it as I typed into my laptop. 

Sometimes Great Grandpa’s rambling seemed to be just that, disconnected musings of a then-94-year-old man.

But other times, just by doing a little digging and analysis, the details were actually good clues for discovering the roots of a significant event to come. 

Sometimes, Mario didn’t think so until I connected the dots for him. One example was when Great Grandpa explained the scenario of moving into the ranch-style house on the winding hill of Montebello Road, just above the Picchetti Winery in Cupertino.

Mario stopped the tape and began: “[My dad] was saying the guy who was supposed to move into the house was allergic to poison oak, and it was all over the place; therefore, he decided against moving in. So the landlord offered the house to my dad, and they moved in - New Year’s Eve, 1915. 

“I don’t think you need to put all that. You could just say they moved in on New Year’s Eve,” Mario told me. 

“He also said that it rained for four consecutive days after they moved in.”

“He also said that it rained for four consecutive days after they moved in. But you don’t have to put that either,” he added.

I also thought those details were rather trivial, so I just noted the date that Great Grandpa, Great Grandma Teresa and Margurite, their daughter, moved to Montebello.

 As we continued transcribing the tapes, something about abandoning those details caused an itch in my brain.

Then it hit me.

“Hey Gramps,” I said, “you might think the weather was not that significant when they moved to Montebello, but think about it a minute.”

“What do you mean?”

“They moved there on New Year’s Eve, 1915. It rained for four days straight. Eight months and 27 days later, you were born.”

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