Strong social connections combined with a sense of purpose are two of the many commonalities shared among communities with the world’s highest concentration of centenarians.

These centenarian hotspots known as Blue Zones provide hope for many people who aren’t blessed with hereditary longevity genes. That’s because lifestyle habits can play up to 60% of a role in how long you might live, medical researchers say.

That means by optimizing your lifestyle, you may gain as much as an extra decade of good life you’d otherwise miss, stresses Dan Buettner, author of the Blue Zones book franchise. His team of researchers originally defined five Blue Zones back in 2008. These regions are Loma Linda, California; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Sardinia, Italy; Ikaria, Greece; and Okinawa, Japan. In 2023, Singapore was added as a sixth Blue Zone.

These areas were dubbed Blue Zones, where people reach age 100 at 10 times greater rates than in the United States, because demographers originally circled these longevity hotspots on a map in blue ink. Once identified, a team of anthropologists, demographers, epidemiologists, and researchers were sent in to study their lifestyle characteristics.

Before breaking down elements of these lifestyle habits, we should explore how much healthy habits can impact your longevity.

Healthy Habits vs. Genetics

What’s unique about centenarians, as well as most people who make it into their 90s, is their ability to slow the aging process by dodging age-related diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and certain cancers, says Dr. Tom Perls, founder of the New England Centenarian Study at the Boston University School of Medicine.

In the past 30 years his study has analyzed more than 3,000 centenarians, including my grandmother, Kay Gemello. Her 105th birthday is June 26. Perls’ medical researchers have explored the genetic factors, lifestyle choices, and environmental influences that appear to play a role in the study participants’ longevity.

Fall, 2025: Grandma Kay at 104

Perls said that to reach age 90, about 75% of longevity is driven by healthy behaviors. The other 25% is genetics.

“When talking about getting to 100, a person’s longevity is slightly less dependent on healthy behaviors. It’s about 60% healthy behaviors, while genetics influence about 40%.”

There are more than 200 genetic variants that affect aging, Stacy Andersen, co-director of the study, told Time magazine.

“Genetics accounts for about 75% of what gets you to really extreme ages like 105 and older,” says Andersen.

Blue Zones Healthy Lifestyle Habits

In the U.S., people on average tend to live their last 12 years battling chronic disease, according to medical researchers. If you want to extend your healthy years, also known as healthspan, these are seven common lifestyle traits practiced in Blue Zone regions.

1. Move naturally. Instead of lifting weights or running marathons, these people live in environments that constantly nudge them into moving without thinking about it. They grow gardens and do not have mechanical conveniences for house and yard work.

2. Sense of purpose. The Okinawans call it ikigai and the Nicoyans call it plan de vida. For both, it translates to “why I wake up in the morning.” Knowing your sense of purpose is worth up to seven years of extra life expectancy.

3. Stress reduction. Stress leads to chronic inflammation, associated with every major age-related disease. What the world’s longest-lived people have that others do not are routines to shed that stress. Okinawans take a few moments each day to remember their ancestors; Adventists in Loma Linda pray; Ikarians take a nap; and Sardinians gather for happy hour.

4. The 80% Rule. Before meals, Okinawans recite hara hachi bu, a 2,500-year-old Confucian reminder to stop eating when 80% full. That small gap may help prevent weight gain. Blue Zone residents also eat their lightest meal early and avoid eating later in the day.

5. Plant-based diet. Beans, including fava, black, soy, and lentils, are the cornerstone of most centenarian diets. Meat—mostly pork—is eaten on average only five times per month.

6. Loved ones first. Blue Zone centenarians prioritize family. They keep older relatives close, commit to a life partner, and invest time in their children. Strong family bonds are linked to longer lives, healthier families, and support when aging parents eventually need care.

7. The right tribe. The world’s longest lived people chose—or were born into—social circles that supported healthy behaviors. Research from the Framingham Studies² shows that smoking, obesity, happiness, and even loneliness are contagious. So the social networks of long-lived people have favorably shaped their health behaviors.

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Can Drinking Red Wine Help You Live Longer?

Centenarians in four of the original five Blue Zones (identified in 2008) commonly drink a little red wine with their meals. However, several new studies over the past few years have indicated that “no amount of alcohol is safe for the brain,” says , author of the Brain Healthy Kitchen, on her recent podcast.

She acknowledges that red wine used to be part of the “10 Brain Healthy Food Groups” published by the MIND diet,* a research-backed eating pattern designed to support brain health and lower the risk of cognitive decline and dementia.

“But they retired it last year when the U.S. Pointer Trial came out because of all the data we’ve had over the years that shows there’s no amount of alcohol that’s safe for the brain,” she says. “We don’t know if [red wine] is one of the reasons the Mediterranean diet is healthy, or if the Mediterranean diet is healthy despite it.”

“Based on what we know now in 2026, we don’t call red wine a brain healthy drink. So if you do drink, be a light drinker, which is six or [fewer] drinks a week,” Fenn advises.

She says she believes it’s the latter, even though red wine is commonly consumed in some Blue Zone regions.

“I think people living in the Blue Zones have so many health factors going for them and their lifestyle outside of diet that inclusion of a little bit of red wine with meals doesn’t take away from their overall health trajectory,” Fenn says.

“Based on what we know now in 2026, we don’t call red wine a brain healthy drink. So if you do drink, be a light drinker, which is six or [fewer] drinks a week,” Fenn advises.

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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

The Gemello Winery family legacy story has jumped the Atlantic Ocean and landed in the family’s country of origin: Italy. Richard Hough, host of the Italian Wine Podcast, interviewed me in an episode that aired last Friday. It was the podcast’s final episode of its 30 author Book Club series, culminating with our chat about the Judgment of Paris. It was a timely discussion, since yesterday marked the 50th anniversary of the famous blind tasting where nine French judges unknowingly selected two California wines over the better-known French wines.

Not to worry, the Italian Wine Podcast is an English-speaking podcast, but one that has a larger audience outside the United States. Only about 40 percent listen from the U.S., according to Rephonic, a podcast research tool. Twenty-one percent listen from Italy.

Hough and I went deep into my Italian heritage and my great-grandfather’s immigration to California in 1912 as opportunities in the New World and the looming threat of Prohibition clashed.

We discussed:

• Prohibition and its aftermath in California

• The history of the Gemello Winery

• The 1976 Judgment of Paris and its impact on the California wine industry

• Grandpa Mario’s victory in a Judgment of Paris rematch

• Grandma Kay’s longevity journey (her 105th birthday is June 26)

This is the first of at least three Italy-based podcasts I’ll be doing in the coming month or two.

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Click to listen to the episode on:

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🎧 Apple Podcasts

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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

Welcome to a newsletter themed at the intersection of longevity and wine history. 🍷

c.1978: John Gemello, founder of the Gemello Winery

In this audio, you’ll hear how Italian winemaker John Gemello, my great-grandfather, found his community in California after emigrating from Northern Italy before World War I. It’s told partly in his voice, audio extracted from a nearly 50-year-old cassette tape.

Great Grandpa Gemello came to the Santa Clara Valley on a solo journey without his wife and daughter, telling them he’d send for them once he got established. A chance encounter a few months later in an Italian immigrant watering hole in downtown San Jose fast-tracked the reunification of the family in the New World.

This story was only partly understood when first listened to many decades ago. However, greater clarity emerged in 2002 when I listened to it with my grandfather, Mario Gemello, as a bonding project, soon after he was diagnosed with prostate cancer.

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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.

I had the pleasure of chatting about Great Depression winemaking challenges and Grandma Kay’s longevity journey with Chuck Cramer. He’s the podcast host of On The Road with Mr. CA Wine.

That name comes from his own wine industry experience. He’s a California native living in London. In his day job, he sells a variety of California brands across Europe and Asia for the Terlato Wine Group.

And of course, we talked about the Judgment of Paris. Cramer does a fascinating job at setting the stage, describing the France vs. California blind tasting as a Rocky Balboa moment. California in 1976 was the overwhelming underdog in the Judgment of Paris as was Rocky, the fictional boxer, in the sports movie that came out that same year, and would be the model for the dozens of sports movies to come afterwards.

Cramer showed a lot of interest in the Gemello story, launching right into questions about how the Gemello family emigrated to California after agricultural challenges in Piedmont, Italy in 1912-1914.

Click to listen to the episode on:

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🎧 Apple Podcast

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Gemello Cabernet Still Standing

Nearly all of the eight or so hosts of the podcasts I’ve been on this year have ended the interview with a variation of this question: Are there any of the 1970 Gemello Cabernet bottles still in the wild?

The answer is surely yes! In fact, Mark Golodetz, the former wine journalist and event organizer of the 25th anniversary Judgment of Paris rematch, says he has several Gemello bottles stashed safely in his cellar.

He popped the cork on one of the award-winning 1970 Gemello Cabernet bottles in February, for another France vs. California rematch. Sort of.

It was an informal event among wine collectors, not a blind tasting with a panel of wine judges, according to David Hamburger, the event organizer. He leads the Wine Workshop at auction house Acker Wines.

Unlike Golodetz’ 25th anniversary rematch, this time it pitted 1980s Bordeaux vs. 1970s California Cabernet.

“Using 1980s Bordeaux vs. 1970s California wines was fair. The eighties was a much better decade [for Bordeaux]. In the previous tastings, the eighties was seen as the golden age for Bordeaux and it really showed,” Golodetz said.

The 1970 Gemello Cabernet was the oldest vintage in the tasting and still showed well. The wine collectors voted it third overall out of 16 bottles, and first among California wines.

The top two this time came from France: 1989 Pétrus topped all wines. In second was 1982 Château Latour. Rounding out the top five were: 1970 Gemello Cabernet, 1977 Phelps Eisele Cabernet (Napa Valley), and 1982 Château Mouton Rothschild (Bordeaux), respectively.

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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.

I had the pleasure of discussing the Judgment of Paris on Our American Stories with Lee Habeeb’s radio show and podcast. It was not only a lot of fun, but it triggered a breakthrough on a project I’ve been wanting to do for a while. And that is to introduce audio to my Substack newsletter to bring the voice of my great-grandfather, John Gemello, to my audience, which is coming soon.

His voice has been preserved in a time capsule of a cassette tape, since the late 1970s. He died in 1981 at the age of 98.

When radio producer Montie Montgomery asked if I could email him some audio clips for the show, I was intrigued but faced with a dilemma. My tape recorders had vanished years ago in spring cleaning efforts. Calls and texts to friends and family who lived through 1980s cassette-boom era turned out empty. Luckily, I was able to purchase a cassette-to-MP3 converter online.

When it arrived, I unwrapped it, slipped the cassette tape into the converter, inserted my earbuds and hit play. Hearing my great-grandfather’s voice took me back. I was nine years old when he passed away. But it made me revisit a more recent memory - in 2002 - when Grandpa Mario Gemello and I sat at his kitchen table, listening to the tapes and transcribing those stories as I typed them into my computer. It was quite emotional. This was a bonding project that Grandpa Mario and I did together as he was ailing from prostate cancer. He died three years later.

In March, I converted about 20 minutes of Great-Grandpa Gemello’s Pre-Prohibition stories from one cassette into an .MP3 file and emailed it to the radio production team, who were deep into editing the segment that aired on the radio yesterday and on podcasts today (links for various podcast apps are below).

The radio and podcast segment focuses on the global impact of the Judgment of Paris on the wine industry when nine French judges did the unthinkable: blindly chose two California wines over France’s more established elite wines.

If you listened to the podcast or radio show, which is syndicated by iHeartMedia’s Premiere Networks, you may wonder if you missed the storytelling of John Gemello in his Italian-rooted broken English. It turns out, you didn’t. It didn’t make the final cut.

One of my first journalism jobs while in college was producing news and sports segments for a radio station in the Los Angeles area. That’s when I learned tough decisions have to be made that may leave good sound bites or ambient sound on the cutting room floor. It could be due to deadlines, time constraints, story angle, or other reasons.

Nevertheless, I now have audio clips for my own editing projects, which I’m excited to share in future Substack posts. Hopefully, that’s an anticipatory tease for you.

Click to listen to the podcast episode on:

🎧 Spotify or

🎧 Apple Podcasts or

🎧 iHeartRadio

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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.

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.

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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.”

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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

  The Centenarian Playbook is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

  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.

I had the pleasure of talking about the 1976 Judgment of Paris with Scott Rank, host of the History Unplugged Podcast, a show not focused on wine, but rather on the biggest turning points in world history.

We dug into why this 1976 blind tasting shocked the global wine industry when two California wines1 beat the French elite wines, and why it was such a significant event it qualified to be discussed on a show that covers topics like World War II strategy debates, lost civilizations, and the Industrial Revolution’s unintended consequences.

History Unplugged, since its launch in 2017, has accumulated more than 20 million downloads from a broad, intellectually curious audience.

Rank often discusses what changes the course of history and why.

As far as the Judgment of Paris goes, it demonstrated that great wines in California were on par with those of France’s top regions, setting off a boom in wine production in the Golden State for the next 50 years.

There were roughly 350 wineries in California in the mid-1970s. Those numbers increased to 1,000 by the year 2000, and more than quadrupled throughout the past 25 years.

However, the entire U.S. wine industry has been experiencing a demand correction. Consumption has declined annually since 2018, except for a pandemic blip in 2020 and ’21. It’s due to a combination of declining consumption, public heath warnings, climate change and government tariffs.

Click to listen to the episode on:

🎧 Spotify or

🎧 Apple Podcasts

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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

Weekend Achievement

🥇 I snagged this medal last weekend after circling Lake Merritt several times, while achieving a personal record in the Kaiser 2026 Oakland 10K (Time: 50:50 at 8:05 mile pace). 🙌 Previous record: 8:29 mile pace.

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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.

2005: The family gathers around Mario Gemello at his 89th birthday party.

Mario Gemello lived for parties. My grandfather, despite being of average height, had a boisterous and charismatic personality. He commanded an audience, always equipped with a joke or story.

I once asked him why he ran for president of his social clubs, like the Kiwanis or his local winegrowers’ association.

“So, I can control the meetings and tell my jokes,” he said.

He learned the winemaking trade from his father, John Gemello, who launched the Gemello Winery in January 1934. Prohibition had just been repealed the previous month. At 17, Grandpa Mario was his right-hand man, while still completing his diploma at Mountain View Union High School during the depths of the Great Depression.

This was long before the Santa Clara Valley had become the heart of the world’s tech center. The phrase Silicon Valley wouldn’t come into existence for decades. Mountain View had just over 3,300 residents then, a far cry from the bustling tech center of 82,000 residents today. Back then, it was a town full of cherry, apricot, and walnut orchards, with homes spaced out between them.

About a decade later, Grandpa Mario, at age 28, took over the day-to-day operations of the winery as his dad semi-retired.

Grandpa Mario’s September birthday parties were a big family ordeal. Sometime in his eighties, he began a new celebratory tradition: the ceremonial picking of the grapes, since his birthday coincided with harvest season. He had planted a grapevine along a fence in his backyard garden of his Los Altos home.

The vine had been plucked in the mid-nineties from the Anderson Valley Obester Winery, run by his niece Sandy Obester. She and her husband Paul also had a sister winery on the Pacific Coast in Half Moon Bay. (A couple of years later, the Obesters would sell the Anderson Valley winery to Margaret and Dan Duckhorn, who would convert it into Goldeneye Winery, well-known for Pinot Noir vintages. Dan Duckhorn died last month at age 87.)

2005: Paul and Sandy Obester clipping grapes at Mario Gemello’s 89th birthday party.

A 1991 doctor visit gave Grandpa Mario a scare. The diagnosis was prostate cancer, but luckily it went into remission for a decade. In the fall of 2001, the cancer returned and with a vengeance.

Doctors were telling the family it was unclear how much time he had left. I was working as a reporter for a Las Vegas newspaper and decided to move home to be close to him.

For the next three years, he was in and out of the hospital, going for chemo treatments and fighting frequent dizzy spells.

As his 89th birthday approached in 2005, he was determined to make it to one last party.

In August, it looked like he may not make it. He collapsed and was rushed to the hospital. But three days later, he emerged with a single demand: Plan that party!

How do you say no to the Godfather? So we did.

But Mother Nature was cruel that summer. It was a horrible year for his grapevine. It had no grapes.

While Mario worried about that dilemma, most of the family worried about his failing health.

He was stubborn. He rejected hospice care, the pain management overseen by nurses. To him, hospice meant death, because doctors predict a person in hospice has six months left or less to live.

The family discovered an alternative called Transitions, which didn’t provide nurses or caregivers, but rather volunteers to come in and chat, keeping a terminally ill person company.

Grandpa Mario accepted Transitions, grudgingly.

While he waited for the first volunteer to arrive, he became consumed with his grapes’ dilemma. His birthday was approaching and his vine was still bare.

One day while I was visiting, he gave me an order:

“Kevin, go to Safeway and buy some grapes. Gotta do it for the kids,” he said, referring to his grown three children. “They won’t know the difference.”

Cousins pose as Mario signs a wine bottle at the party.

Meanwhile, there was a knock on the door. It was a man named Rich.

“Hi Mr. Gemello. I’m from Transitions. It’s an honor to meet you.”

It turns out, Rich knew a lot about the local wine industry, including my grandfather’s name and history.

Grandma Kay left them in the living room and went upstairs to do some ironing.

About a half hour later, she came downstairs and couldn’t find them. She wondered where they could have gone.

Just then she heard a noise, a banging on the side of the house, coming from the wine cellar.

She rushed down there and found Mario, sitting in a chair, signing a 30-year-old bottle of Cabernet for his new friend, whom he had known for 10 minutes. That’s how long it took to bond with my grandfather.

Rich’s day job, it turned out, was working for wealthy homeowners in Saratoga. His one task was caring for Pinot Noir grapevines on their properties.

The next day at the party, my grandfather was feeling great. I arrived early and rushed out back with my bucket of grapes. I put the bucket down, looked up at the vine, and couldn’t believe what I saw. A “miracle” had happened, thanks to Rich.

The vine was full of Pinot Noir grapes. The party was a smashing success.

He passed away a little more than a month later, on October 31, 2005.

2005: Winemakers Mario Gemello and Paul Obester toast to a full life.

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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

Grandma Kay still going at 104 (November 2025)

Some people spend their lives chasing achievement, like the next promotion or bonus. However, it often comes at an unexpected cost: unstable emotional connections with friends and family.

In fact, one of the longest studies ever conducted on human development, known as The Grant Study, suggests that those who prioritized career over personal connection often paid for it with loneliness, illness and regret.

This personality study was launched in the 1930s by Harvard University. It shed light on longevity beyond biology, which piqued my interest, as I’m often reading and researching how my maternal grandmother, Kay Gemello, keeps going at age 104.

The Grant Study examined such issues as nature vs. nurture, connections between personality and health; and whether mental and physical illnesses can be predicted. It also explored whether some of these factors can influence career choice.

The participants began as undergraduates but were surveyed over several decades. As various participants got married and had children, many of their spouses and offspring were included as well.

Over time, more than two thousand men and women “were poked, prodded, interviewed and psychologically analyzed,” writes Charles Duhigg in his new book, Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection.1

Among the first of the participants were Godfrey Camille and John Marsden. The two Harvard undergraduates had contrasting backgrounds.

Camille was raised in a secluded environment, away from other families, because his parents were “pathologically suspicious.” When he arrived at Harvard in 1938, he seemed overwhelmed, researchers noted. He was skinny, physically weak and struggled to make friends. He attended medical school, but shortly after graduation, he attempted suicide. He grew so distant from his family that when his mother and sister died, he hardly mentioned their deaths in his follow-up surveys. At age 35, he was hospitalized for 14 months for pulmonary tuberculosis.

“I was glad to be sick,” he told a researcher. “I could go to bed for a year.”

“I was glad to be sick,” Camille told a researcher. “I could go to bed for a year.”

Marsden’s background was far different. He was an exceptional student from a wealthy and prominent family. He graduated from the University of Chicago Law School, near the top of his class. He became a public-service lawyer, got married and started a successful private practice.

The Grant Study had been designed with the aim of objectivity. The researchers wanted to avoid guessing which participants were likely to soar and stumble. However, they did make predictions. Many thought Marsden would be a leader in his community and Camille would wind up depressed, lonely and perhaps dead by suicide.

If the study had ended when a funding round dried up after 16 years, some might have said those predictions were not far off.

Path Reversal

In the 1970s, though, a group of young psychiatric professors started digging through the study’s boxes and decided to prepare follow-up surveys. When they tracked down Camille and Marsden, both their paths had taken a 180-degree turn.

Camille, now in his 50s, had become a different person. He was married, a leader in his church, and had won over Boston’s medical establishment, founding a clinic specializing in allergy treatments. His daughters, who were young adults by then, called him an “exemplary father,” according to researchers who interviewed them.

The researchers continued follow-up surveys every two years. Each time they spoke to Camille, he seemed happier than ever, Duhigg writes in his book. At his 80th birthday party, he threw himself a potluck and over 300 people came.

Camille said what transformed his life was talking to other people, connecting with them, sharing his joys and sorrows.

“You know what I learned?” he told one interviewer. “I learned love.”

“You know what I learned?” Camille told one interviewer. “I learned love.”

In contrast, Marsden was in terrible shape when the researchers tracked him down in the 1970s. While his law practice was a success, he was divorced, had few friends and spent most of his time alone. He had been alienated from his children and family.

At one point, when Marsden was 43, he shared the following with the researchers:

“I’m growing old. Realize for the first time the reality of death. Feel I may not achieve what I wanted. Not sure I know how to bring up children. Tensions at work are severe.”

Marsden didn’t mention other people or relationships except in a negative way.

Duhigg notes in the book that across the decades and surveys, similar findings emerged again and again. People who had not invested in relationships, who had prioritized careers over family and friends or had struggled to connect for other reasons, were mostly miserable.

The key takeaway: the happiest participants called others regularly, made lunch and dinner dates, sent notes to friends saying they were proud of them, or wanted to help them shoulder sad news, Duhigg writers.

The key takeaway: the happiest participants called others regularly, made lunch and dinner dates, sent notes to friends saying they were proud of them, or wanted to help them shoulder sad news, Duhigg writers.

Most of all, happy participants engaged in many conversations over the years that brought them closer to others.

“Through all the years of studying these lives, one crucial factor stands out for the consistency and power of its ties to physical health, mental health and longevity,” reads a 2023 summary of the Harvard data. “Good relationships keep us healthier and happier.”

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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

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When things are tough, sometimes a helping hand is all you need.

Giovanni Beltramo knew that sentiment. The Northern Italian native emigrated to California in 1880 because a friend and Piedmont native wrote him about opportunities in the Santa Clara Valley.

He landed a winemaking job for San Francisco lawyer John T. Doyle, who had built a summer mansion in Menlo Park. Beltramo supervised Doyle’s “Cupertino Vineyard” on his southern estate.1 Beltramo would later send for his wife back in Piedmont once he got settled and earned enough money for her voyage.

Fast forward three decades later, my great grandfather, John Gemello, made the same trek from Piedmont to San Jose, landing a job at Almaden Vineyards, run by the famed French immigrant and “Champagne King of California” Paul Masson.

When Beltramo reconnected with Gemello at a card table at the Costa Hotel, an Italian immigrant watering hole, he recognized the hardship my great-grandfather was encountering, alone in a foreign country without his family.

What Beltramo did to help him out was nothing short of remarkable. It’s a story I shared on the Beats, Vines and Life podcast with MJ Towler.

WATCH: 👉 Here’s a 30-second Youtube clip from the interview, revealing the generous gift Beltramo bestowed on Gemello.

On the podcast, MJ and I had a lively discussion, diving deep into the Judgment of Paris, Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars history, Gemello Winery history, and the fluke accident leading to the Gemello Cabernet getting added to a Judgment rematch and ultimately winning a blind tasting.

Click to listen to the episode on:

🎧 Spotify, or

🎧 Apple Podcasts

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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

1980: Great Grandpa John Gemello, 97 (right) and son, Mario, 64.

This is a story from the archives. It was originally published in 2024.

Like many old-school winemakers, John Gemello was also a farmer. My great grandfather was born in 1882 in the Italian Alps town of Buttigliera d’Asti, about 40 miles southeast of Turin. By 13, he was helping to prune a vineyard. At 25, he bought two acres for his own small vineyard in Italy’s Piedmont region, before emigrating to California in 1912. He would launch the Gemello Winery in Mountain View in 1934, a month after the repeal of Prohibition. The Gemello wine label would last for nearly seventy years, passed down to his son, Mario (my grandfather), and then to his granddaughter, Sandy Obester.

Naturally, one of John Gemello’s passions in his retirement was gardening. But some time in his senior years, perhaps in his eighties, my great grandfather stepped on a pitchfork in the garden, striking his knee. That painful injury never seemed to let up, worsening over time, especially when he’d kneel in his garden.

“Knee replacement surgery wasn’t common [in 1975], but it would have done wonders for him,” Sandy Obester told me in a 2024 interview.

Sandy and her husband Paul lived in an Eichler-designed house in Palo Alto in 1975. After adding a new bedroom, they agreed to have Sandy’s grandfather move in with them.

At 93, Gemello was often depressed. He had just lost his wife of 70 years. And now, he could no longer engage in the hobby that brought him joy.

One day, Sandy proposed a project to inspire and engage him.

“Grandpa, why don’t you make a barrel of wine?”

“Grandpa, why don’t you make a barrel of wine?” Sandy asked.

That idea intrigued him. Sandy grew up in the 1940s and ‘50s in a house on the Gemello Winery ranch property. Gemello and his son, Mario, were known for decades for making award-winning robust Zinfandel and Cabernet Sauvignon.

A few months later, Paul Obester revisited the home-winemaking idea, asking his grandfather-in-law to share his process.

In his Italian-rooted broken English, he said, “Firsta, you getta tonna grapes.”

Paul laughed, and said, “Do we need a ton? We just want to make a barrel.”

“I onlya knowa one way,” he said. “You getta tonna grapes.”

“That’s O.K. I can divide by two,” Paul said. “So half a ton of grapes.”

For the next two years, Gemello would supervise Paul and Sandy making a barrel of wine in their Palo Alto garage. This would inspire the couple to take winemaking extension courses at UC Davis.

In 1977, the couple purchased a plot of land just off Highway 92 close to where it intersected with Highway 1 in Half Moon Bay. An old barn on the property was converted into a professional winemaking operation as Obester Winery, a legacy lasting for 25 years.

They would produce 8,000 cases of Obester wine and 500 cases of Gemello wine in a typical year. (Paul and Sandy purchased the Gemello Winery assets and trademark from Sandy’s uncle, Mario Gemello, upon his retirement in 1982.)

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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

  Subscribe now

  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.

1980s: Pat Ferguson (my mom), Paul Obester and Grandpa Mario Gemello man a booth.

Southern California wine connoisseur Carl Schroeder remembers the moment he fell in love with wine.

It was 1988. He was newly married, and his palate was beginning to form, largely through the wines his more seasoned, wine-drinking wife Jennifer would buy.

His story may sound familiar to fans of the 2004 movie “Sideways,” where Virginia Madsen’s character Maya tells Miles (played by Paul Giamatti) her ex-husband got her into wine.

Then she qualified her statement: “I got serious about wine about seven years ago.”

This prompted Miles to ask: “And what was the bottle that did it?”

“Eighty-eight Sassicaia,” she said.

For Schroeder, it was a 1985 Gemello Cabernet (a vintage of my grandfather’s wine that was produced by my cousins, Sandy and Paul Obester.1 Schroeder shared this with me last month when he introduced himself via email. That’s fascinating because of how he stumbled upon my family’s wines in his Los Angeles neighborhood wine store.

The Schroeders were invited to a dinner party in Long Beach. He needed a nice bottle of wine to bring. He worked in an office park in Sherman Oaks and walked across the street to his go-to wine shop, the Valley Beverage Company.

He scanned a bin full of random wines. Unfamiliar with most, he grabbed the Gemello Cabernet with its iconic “GW” logo and its tagline: GW Means Good Wine.

How my grandfather’s wines got to that retailer is a mystery. Gemello distribution in Southern California was limited. Occasionally, it would wind up in a Trader Joe’s or a small wine shop.

“Everyone at dinner that night fell in love with that bottle of wine, and as we drove home, all we could talk about was the bottle of Gemello,” he said.

“Everyone at dinner that night fell in love with that bottle of wine, and as we drove home, all we could talk about was the bottle of Gemello,” he said.

“Over the next year, that wine shop was my go-to place for wine, and it was always to grab yet another bottle of Gemello,” he said.

Schroeder said his shopping habit of Gemello wines would be to buy one bottle at a time and did it about seven or eight times. He just assumed they would replenish the supply when it ran low.

But that ended when he took a new job and had to move to Orange County. That may only be one county south, but it might as well be a world away with congested Los Angeles freeways in between. So, he never went back.

At his new job, he became friendly with a vice president whom he describes as a “complete wine geek.” He introduced him to many premium wines, like Château Lynch-Bages of Bordeaux, Chateau Montelena, Caymus Vineyards, among others.

One day he asked Schroeder what his favorite wine was. He said: Gemello.

“Gemello?” his colleague questioned. “Never heard of it.”

He tried to look up Gemello Winery in a wine database. Not knowing it was in Mountain View, he filtered for Sonoma and Napa. Naturally, nothing came up.

Schroeder was starting to doubt himself, he told me in a phone interview recently.

“Maybe I had the name wrong. Maybe I was spelling it wrong, or something. But at that time, I just sort of forgot about Gemello. It sort of became a mirage in my mind,” he said.

Then a few years ago, Gemello wines re-emerged among his thoughts as he did some research for a wine client. (He’s now the CEO of a market research company. He and his wife Jennifer are approaching their 40th wedding anniversary.)

This prompted him to google “Gemello Winery.” He discovered the Gemello Winery Instagram account I had created promoting my grandfather’s legacy, and the stories I was sharing on Substack.

He closed the initial email by sharing his gratitude.

“So Kevin, and all who are associated with Gemello, thank you so much for your family’s legacy, and for that legacy introducing me to the incredible world of wine. Without Gemello, I may still be stuck with a bottle of Lancers in my hand.”

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

  Leave a comment

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.

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This will be an exciting year for the California wine history as we embark on the 50th anniversary of the Judgment of Paris coming up in four months. May 24th to be exact. I had the pleasure of discussing the 1976 landmark event that transformed the wine industry with Matt Wood, host of the Indie Wine Podcast, last week.

British wine merchant Steven Spurrier led top French wine experts to unknowingly pick two California wines over France’s most elite bottles. Chateau Montelena and Stag’s Leap took top honors.

Twenty-five years later, a rematch was held—and my grandfather’s 1970 Gemello Cabernet took first place.

Wood and I discuss:

1. How a British wine merchant wound up hosting the event in honor of America’s Bicentennial.

2. Why French media scoffed at covering the event.

3. How a fluke accident led to the Gemello Cabernet getting added to the tasting.

Mark Golodetz, a former European correspondent for the Wine Enthusiast and the organizer of the 25th anniversary event, also shares insights about his event on the podcast.

Click below to listen to the episode on:

1. 🎧 Spotify or

2. 🎧 Apple Podcasts

The 50th Anniversary Rematch

The 1970 Gemello Cabernet is being forced to defend its title in another Bordeaux vs. California Cabernet rematch on February 1. Golodetz is hosting the 50th anniversary blind tasting in Westchester, New York. (Golodetz and Wood discuss it on the podcast.)

The Gemello Cabernet is going head-to-head with many of the heavyweights again, including the 1974 Heitz Martha’s Vineyard, 1982 Mouton Rothschild, 1989 Petrus, among others. The Gemello Cab is the oldest vintage in the tasting by at least four years. Is it past its prime? Judges at the Hudson Prime Steakhouse will make that call.

However, a Gemello vintage ten years older —1960 Gemello Cabernet— fared well just two years ago at a special lunch among wine collectors from three different states. Dan Kravitz, a wine importer from Maine, raved about it on the Wine Berserker community message board soon after the lunch, prompting me to interview him.

“It’s one of the great wines of my life,” Kravitz told me.

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

Leave a comment

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.

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c. 1978: John Gemello, founder of Gemello Winery

In 1912, my great-grandfather immigrated to California, bringing his Italian winemaking skills to the Santa Clara Valley. When Prohibition hit eight years later, Great Grandpa John Gemello pivoted from winemaking to berry-peddling. He and his partners invested in a fleet of trucks, operating a sort of traveling farmers’ market, delivery vegetables house to house throughout the county.

For the past six months, I’ve been using AI to restore old or low-resolution family photos, such as this orginal 1920s-era photo below. It features Great Grandpa John Gemello and two of his children, Mario (my grandfather) and my great aunt, Sally.

AI allows you to fix cracks and remove noise while trying to preserve the identity of the people and the environment of images. While AI has its skeptics, I view the technology as a way to improve an image by making it more visible and clear.

I previously resisted colorizing this photo. After spending 20-30 minutes with several prompting tweaks (keeping it in B&W), I struggled to remove as much noise as I wanted. I finally said, “What if?” I decided to try to colorize it using Topaz Labs (a partner tool inside Adobe Firefly Boards). It did, in fact, remove much of the noise.

Adding subtle color not only cleaned up the image but brought a new vibrancy to their faces, clothing textures, and even the vegetable truck itself.

Sometimes, stepping outside tradition (whether in history or creative tools) reveals a new layer of storytelling. A faded memory can come alive again - with just a spark of curiosity.

Restoring Photos Gone Awry

Grandpa Mario, the little boy in the 1920s photo, was married to my grandmother for 64 years before passing away in 2005. He was 89. This has left Grandma Kay a widow for the past 20 years. She turned 104 last summer.

Every December for the past decade, I’ve been making her a family calendar for Christmas. I incorporate family photos from the past year, but also reach into my archives for digitized old photos of Grandpa Mario.

The exercise of using AI to enhance a Prohibition-era family photo inspired me to upscale a favorite photo of my grandparents dancing at an Italian-style dinner party from the 1990s.

In the photo, Grandma Kay is laughing as she’s held in a partner dance hold with Grandpa Mario. The only problem: her eyes were closed. So I got a little greedy, and prompted AI to make a small tweak: open her eyes. It worked (sort of).

On my phone and my laptop, the new image looked okay. However, in its final version, on an 8-x-11-inch calendar photo, her face had a different shape. When Grandma Kay unwrapped her calendar, turned to the April month, and saw it, she blurted out: “Whose Grandpa dancing with?”

Many family members who were seeing the photo from a distance said, “that’s you!”

“That doesn’t look like me,” she said.

The shape of her face was off, as was her nose, eyes and mouth.

Yikes! What have I done?

It turns out Topaz is good for clarity, but not so good for “identity locking,” or holding true to a person’s likeness. When I asked the tool to open her eyes, it had to “invent” her eyes, without other photos of her to reference. This recreation is perhaps good for stock photos, but not good for family history, and not something I would encourage after doing this research.

Grandma Kay hangs her calendar in her living room, where she spends most of her time when not tinkering in her garden or eating her meals in her dining area.

Imagining her staring at a Grandma Kay look alike that’s a little off for 30 days come April, troubles me. I might have to make a new one and sneak it up on the wall, while she’s distracted. For decades, we’ve tried to convince her to get a computer. Since she has not relented, she doesn’t read my newsletter.

I trust that you won’t tell her. It’ll be our little secret.

How AI Image Tools Work

If you want to know more about AI image tools and how they work, Denyse Allen often writes about them from a family historian’s perspective. In this photo restoration post, she goes deeper into the topic, including how Google’s new AI image technology takes a different approach than other tools.

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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

Share

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.

1978: My cousins and I (that’s me, #40) pose at Grandpa Mario’s last grape crush

Do you ever wonder how many of your life-changing moments were caused by an accident or happenstance?

I’ve been thinking about that as I’ve rounded up this year-in-review for 2025. Three pivotal moments: where would most of my family be (or would I have even been born) if it hadn’t rained for four days around a particular New Year’s Eve? What if a clumsy wine cellar incident didn’t occur in 2001, prompting a blind tasting event organizer to reach for my grandfather’s winning 1970 Gemello Cabernet as a replacement? What if a college student’s Vietnam draft number hadn’t been cancelled and the future winemaking assistant had gone off to war?

What About You?

Do you have special moments in your life caused by happenstance? If so, share them in the comments.

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Below is the roundup of all my posts for this past year. Feel free to dip into the archives and read any posts you may have missed.

Wine History Stories

1. A clever scheme that launched the Judgment of Paris

2. In 1934, Prohibition ends and the Gemello Winery is launched

3. Ridge Winery’s secret crop in the vines

4. A ride of a lifetime during a Soviet Ukrainian wine tour

5. Baseball legends and a game with Grandpa Mario

6. The lost wine records thanks to Prohibition

7. From Prohibition bootlegging to a century of wine at Guglielmo Winery

8. Revisiting the Judgment of Paris at age 25

9. Wine collectors from three states unite to uncork a 1960 Gemello Cabernet

10. A baseball trip and a journey through time

11. From war draft to dinner and wine with Jack Nicklaus

Health & Longevity Stories

1. Grandma Kay’s proof that healthy habits can help you outlast the odds

2. Okinawa’s lessons on living to 100

3. Ten takeaways from a longevity summit

4. Preventing Alzheimer’s through food, a Q&A with

5. Singapore’s secret to a longer, better life

6. Grandma Kay at 104: from underground clubs to birthday cupcakes

7. The daily battles inside a mind at 104

8. Meet the 106-year-old who refuses to quit flying

9. Why older adults resist going to the emergency room

10. When love lasts beyond a lifetime

11. Mining Grandma Kay’s memory at 103

12. Revenge on the grandma scammer

13. Simple hobbies bring joy and mental stimulation

14. How the pandemic lockdown led to me launching this Substack newsletter

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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

  The Centenarian Playbook is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

2001: Mario & Kay Gemello in Vancouver

From the archives: This post was originally published in 2023.

Mario Gemello was the ultimate handyman. In his early newlywed days, Grandpa Mario worked double shifts. Winemaking by day. Construction by night.

His parents offered to give up their 3-bedroom house on the Gemello ranch in Mountain View, if Mario would build a second smaller house on the property for them to move into. This was the not-so-subtle way of saying we’re hoping for grandchildren and don’t want to go far to see them.

This was in 1941. Mario would come in from working in the winery all day, eat something to refuel, then go back out hammering away. Like an amateur accountant, he tracked his building expenses - $4,000 in all - in a small blue notebook.

Those do-it-yourself skills would come in handy three decades and three children later. Pat (Gemello) Ferguson, my mom, would come first. John three years later. Mark seven years after John. In 1970, Mario and Grandma Kay would launch a Christmas tradition: a treasure hunt of sorts for his young adult children. A hundred dollar bill hidden inside a homemade gift, often built in Mario’s toolshed of a garage.

“This was a project my mom and dad love to do together,” Pat said. “My mom has told me many times that around November, they’d sit at the kitchen table and draw up ideas.”

“This was a project my mom and dad love to do together,” Pat Ferguson said. “My mom has told me many times that around November, they’d sit at the kitchen table and draw up ideas.”

On Christmas Day, Pat, John and Mark would assemble on my grandparents’ couch, unwrap a foot-high wooden reindeer, and they’d say, “That’s cute. Thanks.”

Mario would say: “If you were hoping for something more, not to worry. There might be something hidden somewhere on or inside your little Rudolph.”

Within a few minutes of tinkering, one of the siblings would notice the red nose was loose. Popping it off would reveal a rolled-up hundred dollar bill stuffed inside.

My grandparents tried not to be too predictable. So occasionally, the unwrapping would reveal a gift not built from Mario’s toolshed. Like the year the trio wound up staring at clear cylinders of shredded money. The hundred dollar bills would be found buried within the pieces of confetti.

Another year, Mario claimed he was out of creative ideas and decided not to do the hidden money gag.

An air of disappointment swept across the living room, at least among one generation. Meanwhile, my brother, cousins and I happily unwrapped our gifts.

At one point, Uncle John sneezed, prompting Mario to grab a box of Kleenex. “Here, take a tissue.”

“I have a handkerchief,” John said.

“Go on, grab a Kleenex anyway,” Mario insisted.

John pulled a tissue and a dollar bill slipped out from under the tissue and fluttered to the ground.

“Where did that come from?” Mario asked with joy. “Wonder if there’s more.”

“Where did that come from?” Mario asked with joy. “Wonder if there’s more.”

The yank of each tissue produced another dollar bill. And you guessed it: a hundred in each of the three boxes.

“Boy, you sure had a lot of time on your hands this year, Gramps!” I told him.

Despite the tediousness of slipping a dollar between three hundred tissues, it’s hard to put a price on the joy he got in tricking his kids into thinking the tradition may be over.

Other years, some of these money gags, that would often turn into future holiday decorations, included a wooden snowman, a hot-plate made of Gemello wine corks and a tennis ball with a bill inserted into a tiny hole, then covered by the ball’s fur.

The lack of creative consistency had my mom and two uncles on the lookout for any clues well before the game would commence, usually after the grandchildren opened their gifts.

One year in the mid-1980s, Uncle Mark thought he spotted a clue early Christmas Day. His daughter, Lisa, a darling little four-year-old, had just unwrapped a small foldable chalkboard. It was held together with three screws.

Mark said, “Pat, John, look: three screws. You think?”

“Get a screwdriver,” John instructed his younger brother.

Grandpa Mario returned from another room to see Mark gripping the chalkboard on its side, about to loosen the first screw.

“What are you doing? That’s not it you numbskull!” Mario exclaimed.

That year, Mario and Grandma Kay (this had to be her idea) repeated an earlier concept, a wooden reindeer, but this time, a baby one with a twist: its trunk was a potpourri-filled square box. Hardly difficult to guess where the cash was stashed.

If you are the one in your family feeling pooped at the end of a day of putting up holiday decorations, and wonder if all the hard work is worth it, consider this: it’s likely that a random ornament or a certain decoration triggers a special memory for each of your family members, even if they don’t express it as frequently as they should.

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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

Other Great Substacks Worth Reading

1. shares 9 tips for hosting a holiday-themed wine tasting party

2. Superfood meal prep, Italian-style, by

3. offers 10 tips for increasing your healthy years (healthspan)

4. shares the 12 Italian wines of Christmas

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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.

February, 2026: Grandma Kay Gemello

Grandma Kay’s mysteriously missing second car, which I mentioned a few weeks ago, has been on her mind a lot lately. In fact, the empty spot in her garage, where my late grandfather used to park his car 20 years ago, triggered her 104-year-old brain to blurt out: “It’s been stolen.”

She even called one of my uncles demanding that he file a police report.

While she’s never been diagnosed with dementia, doctors throughout her late nineties suggested any memory loss or forgetfulness was common for people her age.

However, she started to have delusions, or firmly held false beliefs about two years ago, likely a result of back to back health issues: a weeklong bout with COVID, followed by a urinary tract infection (UTI). Delusions are common for people in mid- to late-stage dementia, according to the Alzheimer’s Association.

For the past two years, Grandma Kay’s care has been elevated from part-time caregiving to round-the-clock monitoring. She would often question why she needed a caregiver.

Something I’ve learned working with a memory care community years ago is that you’re not supposed to argue with people battling delusions or try to reason with them. Instead, you are supposed to validate their feelings. But it can be hard to turn off our logical brain, especially when she’s telling us to call the police about her delusion of a stolen car.

There’s usually no more than one caregiver visiting her at a time, but perhaps after a shift change, Grandma Kay thinks the previous caregiver is in the kitchen.

“There’s too much traffic in the kitchen,” she’d say sometimes, while sitting in her living room even out of view of the kitchen.

“There’s too much traffic in the kitchen,” she’d say sometimes, while sitting in her living room even out of view of the kitchen.

Recently, one of the caregivers discovered a novel way to ease her anxiety in response to the “traffic.” Sitting next to her in the living room, she clapped her hands and raised her voice: “OK, everybody leave.”

That seemed to calm her nerves for the moment.

Rather than trying to convince her the “traffic” wasn’t real, the Alzheimer’s Association advises family members to acknowledge her distress by saying something like: “It seems like things feel noisy around you. That must be upsetting.”

Experts in cognitive behavior suggest actually going through the motions of flipping a light switch off as opposed to verbally ordering the light switch off can also be helpful. It can give her brain the “done” signal.

The Missing Car Mystery

The day she first claimed her car was stolen, she repeated it multiple times to her caregiver.

Then, while taking a stroll in her backyard near the fence that separates the neighbor’s yard, she encountered her neighbor.

“Hi, Kay. How are you?” he asked. “Have you seen this?”

He was pointing to a busted sprinkler pipe on her side of the property that was flooding the area.

The busted pipe should have been an epiphany. Her water bill had been a source of confusion, tripling in the past month. But instead, Grandma Kay signified that was the least of her problems at the moment.

“Did you steal my car?” she blurted out.

“Did you steal my car?” Grandma Kay blurted out.

Taken aback, he said, “No, but I can help you look for it.”

Later, my mom arrived to take her for a doctor checkup. The doctor’s office is in Mountain View, near El Camino Hospital. To get there, they drove through the hospital’s vast parking lot, which was full of cars.

“Wow! It’s so busy today. Look at all these cars,” she said.

My mom told her the parking lot was for the entire healthcare campus, containing a range of medical office buildings and specialty care surgery offices.

“Maybe we should look for my car here,” Grandma Kay said.

How to Respond to a Perceived Theft

The Alzheimer’s Association says theft-type delusions are among the common delusions in dementia.

Although not grounded in reality, the situation is very real to the person with dementia. A person with dementia is trying to make sense of her world with declining cognitive function.

Here are ways the Alzheimer’s Association suggests responding to dementia patients having delusions.

• Don’t take offense. Listen to what is troubling the person, and try to understand that reality. Then be reassuring, and let the person know you care.

• Don’t argue or try to convince. Allow the individual to express ideas. Acknowledge his or her opinions.

• Offer a simple answer. Share your thoughts with the individual, but keep it simple. Don’t overwhelm the person with lengthy explanations or reasons.

• Switch the focus to another activity. Engage the individual in an activity, or ask for help with a chore.

• Duplicate any lost items (obviously if they aren’t cars). If the person is often searching for a specific item, have several available. For example, if the individual is always looking for his or her wallet, purchase two of the same kind.

• Share your experience with others. Join an online support community, like the Alzheimer’s Association, and share what response strategies have worked for you and get more ideas from other caregivers.

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  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:

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Two wine merchants in Paris were looking for a way to promote their French wine school and shop. It was 1975. Patricia Gallagher, an American, ran the school. Her British business partner, Steven Spurrier, ran the shop, Cavs de la Madeline. The shop was near many of the foreign embassies and often hosted dignitaries and staff members to taste their country’s wines.

Gallagher had just returned from a California vacation where she visited a number of Napa Valley wineries.

“We’ve got to do a California tasting at the store,” she told Spurrier.

He was intrigued, but said they need a “raison d’être” to help market the event.

The 200th anniversary of America’s Independence was the following year. She proposed tying the tasting to that event.

“The Bicentennial is a big deal!” She said.

“Is it?” Spurrier questioned. “We never celebrated it in England, having lost the war.”

Nevertheless, Spurrier, who died in 2021 at age 79, was never one to pass up a marketing opportunity, so he agreed to go along with it.1

And that’s how the concept of the famous Judgment of Paris event was conceived. On May 24, 1976, two California wines, both 1973 varietals, topped France’s elite wines by a panel of nine wine experts - all French judges. Château Montelena chardonnay won the white category. Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars cabernet sauvignon won the red. It sent shockwaves through the industry, putting California wines on the international map. This coming year marks the 50th anniversary of the Judgment of Paris. (My grandfather’s 1970 Gemello cabernet took first place in the 25th anniversary re-enactment of the Judgment blind tasting.)

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Hurdles For Media Coverage

Getting media coverage was an uphill battle.

The French media blew it off. Spurrier reached out to Le Monde, L’Express and Le Figaro among others. None showed any interest, suggesting there was no story if France was going to win anyway.

George Taber, a Time magazine correspondent, was familiar with the shop, having taken a class at Gallagher’s L’Académie du Vin. He accepted the invitation, but was skeptical it would be newsworthy. The event was going to be held on a Monday, the slowest news day of the week, since Time went to print on Fridays, Taber said at a 40th anniversary event in 2016.

Spurrier gave Taber a score card, and the list of wines in the order the judges would be tasting.

“Since I was the only reporter there, I was free to roam around the room,” Taber said at the 40th anniversary. “If more reporters were there, Steven would have probably stuck us in the corner or something,” Taber said.

As the nine judges tasted, they spoke a lot - in French. Luckily, Taber was fluent in French, having worked in Europe over the past seven years. That French banter helped Taber realize a story was brewing halfway through the white wine contest.

“A judge held up a glass of wine, swirled it around, tasted it, held it back up, and said, “Ah! Back to France!”

Taber looked at his score card, and noticed the judge had just tasted Freemark Abbey from Napa Valley.

“That’s when I knew I may have a story,” he said.

Other Wine Writers Worth Reading

1. Tom Wark has written a fascinating article on A History of Wine’s Future, by looking back at the past quarter century and making predictions for the next 25 years.

2. Dave McIntyre writes about the Magic of Burnt Hill, a Maryland winery he says is a new “shining star” that puts the focus on the farm.

3. Nikki Dickerson makes a case for Montepulciano d’Abruzzo as the ultimate Thanksgiving wine.

4. Jason Wilson questions whether wine is “an experience” or a “thing.” Where does wine fit into the prevailing late-capitalist ethos of buying experiences over stuff?

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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

Share

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.

People get inspired when they hear Grandma Kay at 104 still exercises at her neighborhood park, pushing her walker around a quarter-mile loop. When she’s not up to going to the park, she’ll do circles around her house, which is not easy or something the family prefers. The backyard has a multi-level deck to navigate, and concrete steps to descend in the front yard.

One older centenarian in Texas named Cretora Biggerstaff would probably question what the fuss is all about. She’s 106, and until recently she was frequently hassled by airport security every time she tried boarding a plane. Yes, that’s right: she flies yearly, according to an interview she did with her local Fox TV station in Houston, Texas.

The problem she kept running into involved airport computers struggling to detect an age over 100. It frustrated her, suggesting Homeland Security was treating her “like a criminal.”

“I know what the majority think, ‘Oh, she’s 106. She’s probably drooling in a wheelchair, doesn’t know what she’s doing,’” she told a TV reporter. “Well, I got news for them. I know exactly what I’m doing.”

The tech hiccup may trigger Y2K flashbacks for anyone who grew up in the 20th century: paranoia of worldwide computer crashes thought to be caused by the millennial calendar flip.

“We have trouble from check-in to TSA with the computer thinking she’s five or six years old from 1919 to 2019,” said Sue Tosi, Biggerstaff’s daughter.

Last spring, Biggerstaff’s friend helped her craft an email complaint to the U.S. Transportation Department and CEOs of two airlines. Delta did not respond. United did. In fact, in a recent follow-up TV interview, Biggerstaff said United gave her “VIP treatment” when she flew from Florida to Houston.

“[They] really did. The stewardess comes up to me and said, ‘Cretora, what would you like to drink?’” she said, looking confused.

“Yes, I know your name,” said Biggerstaff, repeating the stewardess’s words. “So they were all waiting for me.”

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

Share

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.

This story is from the archives. It was originally published in October 2023.

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 in September, 1934. The first since the end of Prohibition.

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, followed by a blank page for no sales the next day, followed by a 10-gallon barrel being sold the day after that.

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

“In those days, we had no cash register, just a little drawer,” Mario Gemello 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.

Grandpa Mario (age 64) and his father, John (98), in 1980.

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 winemaking in 1937.

By 1944, Mario at age 28 took charge 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 three 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 with our labels. One of our first outstanding wines was a 1960 Cabernet Sauvignon,” Mario said.

Share

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

  Share

  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.