The 1934 Launch of The Gemello Winery

Prohibition ends and the seeds are planted for what would become an award-winning winery.

👋 Hello, I’m Kevin Ferguson, author of 🍷 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.

This is a middle chapter. I hope you enjoy it!

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The 1934 Launch of The Gemello Winery

Sleep deprived and blurry-eyed, 17-year-old Mario Gemello stumbled out of his father’s truck. They had just arrived home after a long bumpy overnight ride from Napa. It was harvest season. September, 1934.

The bed of their truck was filled with 10 tons of wine grapes. Ready to be crushed.

My grandfather, Mario, hadn’t slept all night, and his father, John, put him to work that morning, racking wine in his exhaustive state.

“I fell asleep. The wine started running all over the floor of the winery. But that wasn't my fault,” Mario recalled years later.

Mario had just started his senior year at Mountain View Union High, but was getting a different education, working alongside his dad evenings, weekends and occasional trips to wine country.

The Gemello Winery, located at 2003 El Camino Real in Mountain View, was a family operation. During these Depression era days, my great grandmother, “Noni”, tallied daily sales in a small diary-like book. One 5 gallon demijohn of wine sold one day. Some days, a page may be blank, followed by a 10 gallon barrel being sold the next.

“In those days, we had no cash register, just a little drawer,” Mario said. “Each sale would have government stamps on the container, so much per gallon. They had to be pasted right on the container.”

Customers in those days could taste the wine before they bought it. If they wanted to, they would be escorted into what they called a “barrel shop,” which contained a whole line of barrels.

“There would be a little spigot on each barrel and you could give a person a taste of the wine when he came in. If he liked it, we'd fill his jug up,” Mario said. 

By December 1934, Gemello Winery produced 3,891 gallons. The following year, it increased production to 5,680 gallons.

The majority of the family’s income still came from farming. That trend would switch to wine-making in 1937.

By 1944, Mario took charge at age 28 of the winery upon his father’s semi-retirement.

After the war, Mario purchased a liquor license, becoming one of the few if not the only, in California to have 3 licenses: a bonded winery, a retail wine operation and the liquor license. He felt like he bit off more than he could chew, running it all himself. 

By 1956, he brought on the Sarto brothers, Louis and Boise, as partners. Mario sold the retail operation to them. The deal: Mario produced the wine and Sartos sold it. 

This was a turning point. 

“We started bottling wine with cork finish and our labels. One of our first outstanding wines was a 1960 Cabernet Sauvignon,” Mario said.

Gemello Shocks the Wine Industry

Mario retired in 1982, two years shy of the 50th anniversary of the Gemello Winery.

But 20 years later, Mario’s imprint on the wine industry was still being felt. This was evident when he received an unexpected phone from the media in 2002.

A Wine & Spirits reporter wanted his reaction to another California wine beating the darlings of the French wine industry in a recent blind tasting. 

This tasting was a re-enactment of the famous 1976 “Judgement of Paris” that put California wines on the map. It was such a shocker that two Napa wines won in ‘76, that Hollywood converted that story into Bottle Shock, a movie with wine critic Steven Spurrier being portrayed by Alan Rickman (the actor perhaps best known as Hans Gruber in Die Hard).

The 2002 blind tasting re-enactment was to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the Spurrier event. It was held in Manhattan and included many of the heavyweights (mostly from the 1970 vintage), like Stag’s Leap, BV Private Reserve, Heitz Martha’s Vineyard, Latour and eight others. Tasters were instructed to identify if a wine was French or American. Rank their top five wines. Scores were then averaged, and a group favorite was revealed.

And that favorite was not only from California, but from the Santa Clara Valley: the 1970 Gemello Cabernet Sauvignon.

It turned out, the Gemello Cab, not just won, but won decisively. It ranked first for 14 of 16 judges.

One of the judges, Eric Asimov, would write in the New York Times a few years later, that the Gemello Cab was “both obscure and legendary.”

It was one of the best vintages my grandfather had made, Mario told the Wine & Spirits reporter.

This was a proud memory for my grandfather, who passed away of cancer in 2005.

About two weeks before his death, I sat with him at Mountain View’s El Camino Hospital, for his last round of radiation. He asked me to bring him the Wine & Spirits article. He wanted to read it one more time.

You’re invited! Gemello Block Party: Nov. 16th

I’ll be the guest speaker at the Los Altos History Museum’s “Block Party Series” in November. Second in the block party series is: Gemello Neighborhood. Come hear me share the story of the Gemello Winery, and the colorful characters behind it all. It will be held from 5:30 - 7 pm, Thursday, Nov. 16th.

Mark your calendar! More details to come.

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