A Tape Rich in Wine History
Unraveling mysteries from two generations of a wine family.
Our guest writer,
of Rain on the Monte Bello Ridge joins us with his first contribution to the Projectkin Members’ Corner. These posts celebrate our members’ contributions to family history storytelling — in narratives, recordings, and more. Explore the entire Members’ Corner here.
I’ll never forget when I discovered my passion for unraveling my family’s history.
It was a Sunday afternoon in 2002. I was sitting at the kitchen table with Grandpa Mario Gemello. We were listening to stories on a cassette tape. The voice on the tape was his father, John Gemello, who died in 1980 at age 98.
What triggered this bonding project was some startling news earlier that year: Grandpa Mario had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. I wanted to document his story as a winemaker in the Bay Area for nearly half a century. Meanwhile, how much time my grandfather had left was a mystery.
But Grandpa Mario didn’t want to talk so much about himself, but rather his inspiration: that was his father. As a teenager, Grandpa Mario helped his father launch the Gemello Winery in Mountain View, California. This was in the depths of the Great Depression in 1934, a month after the repeal of Prohibition.
When Great Grandpa John Gemello was in his 90s, he lived with my cousins, Paul and Sandy Obester, who ran a Half Moon Bay winery under their own name. One day in the late 1970s, they had the brilliant idea of having great-grandpa retell his adventurous stories of the old days while they pushed “record” on a cassette tape.
He had quite a life: winemaking in Italy, working in coal mines in Germany, and getting letters from friends who had immigrated to the Santa Clara Valley raving about the San Francisco Bay Area opportunities.
In 1912, John Gemello kissed his wife and daughter goodbye, boarded a ship in the Adriatic Sea, and set sail for America. He told the family he’d send for them once he got settled and had the money to do so. He landed a job at Almaden Vineyards, run by Paul Masson, the famous French immigrant who pioneered the making of sparkling wine in the Santa Cruz Mountains.
The money to send for his family was another fascinating story told on the tape. It was a chance encounter. He was playing cards at the Costa Hotel, a San Jose watering hole frequented by Italian immigrants, and he bumped into another Piedmontese immigrant: Giovanni Beltramo. The families were close back in Italy. He offered to loan my great-grandfather the money to cover his family’s travel expenses to America.
A Bay Area Institution: Beltramo’s
Beltramo’s historical significance in the Bay Area went over my head in 2002 when my grandfather and I transcribed the story from the cassette tape. During the pandemic lockdown, I reread the transcript, which triggered an urge to learn more about him. Unfortunately, my grandfather lost his bout to cancer in 2005.
I asked my mom if the Beltramo name rang a bell. “Of course! That’s the family that ran the Beltramo’s Wine & Spirits store. It was on El Camino in Menlo Park forever.”
Filling in Holes from the Tape
Forever? Almost. The Beltramo store had a 134-year history before closing in 2016. On its last day of business, it generated a lot of local media coverage. The articles often quoted Giovanni Beltramo’s great-granddaughter, Diana Beltramo Hewitt. I found her on LinkedIn and reached out. She was happy to share her family’s history with me.
She explained that, like my great-grandfather, her ancestor, Giovanni Beltramo, came to America because a friend wrote him letters about opportunities in the Santa Clara Valley. His voyage in 1880 was 32 years ahead of my great-grandfather's.
One night in 1913, at the Costa Hotel card table, Giovanni Beltramo asked my great-grandfather why his family hadn’t come with him.
“Didn’t have the money yet,” Gemello told him.
Beltramo, who was 53 then, asked the 30-year-old Gemello if he had hoped to send for them later. Gemello answered, “Of course!”
Beltramo knew all too well the challenges of trying to make it alone in a new world. He offered my great-grandfather a loan of $190 for first-class tickets from Italy to San Jose. He accepted.
The Sprouting Of A Tree Branch
In 1915, John Gemello landed a job at the Picchetti Winery on Montebello Road in Cupertino as his bachelor lifestyle ended. He also needed to rent a house to accommodate his wife and daughter.
When I first listened to the cassette tape with my grandfather in 2002, we created a transcribing system to accommodate my great-grandfather’s heavy Italian accent. We’d listen to a segment, and then Grandpa Mario would hit stop and translate as I’d type into my computer.
To find a home for his family, John Gemello found an empty house adjacent to the Picchetti Wintery. When he inquired, he discovered poison oak on the property had spooked a potential tenant.
“So the landlord offered the house to my dad,” Grandpa Mario said, noting that the poison oak didn’t bother him. “They moved in - New Year’s Eve, 1915.”
Grandpa Mario found many of those details trivial. “I don’t think you need to put all that. You could say they moved in on New Year’s Eve, 1915.”
Then he added, “he also said that it rained for four consecutive days after they moved in. But you don’t have to put that either.”
I agreed, and we moved on. A few minutes later, a thought hit me.
“Hey, Gramps, you might think the weather was not that significant when they moved to Montebello, but think about it.”
“Hey, Gramps, you might think the weather was not that significant when they moved to Montebello, but think about it…”
“What do you mean?”
“They moved there on New Year’s Eve, 1915. It rained for four days. Eight months and 27 days later, you were born.”
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Some of my best Ah Ha! moments have come from small details. Often it's not one detail that matters, it's the picture created by the thousand dots of details.
Sobering to think...but for the rain, where would you be now? (: