Our annual summer celebration will feature ice cream and Mtn. View winemaking history!
Celebrate summer with us at the historic Adobe Building for our annual Ice Cream Social! We are excited to welcome Kevin Ferguson as our featured guest speaker. Kevin will share 100 years of Mountain View history through the stories of a winemaking family, the Gemellos. For much of the 20th Century the Gemellos operated their family winery on El Camino Real in Mountain View while dealing with the city’s growth. Discover their fascinating history while enjoying some delicious ice cream!
Our Special Guest Speaker: Kevin Ferguson
Kevin Ferguson grew up playing in the orchards of Mountain View and Los Altos, at the home and winery of his maternal grandparents, the Gemellos. He earned a degree in journalism and worked as a reporter in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. After returning home to the Bay Area in the early 2000s, his grandfather, Mario Gemello, shared with him an old cassette tape of his great grandfather telling tales of the old days of Mountain View. It also unlocked a treasure trove of stories of the eldest Gemello’s emigration from Italy to the Santa Clara Valley, the struggles during Prohibition and the launch of Gemello Winery in the depths of the Great Depression. These stories are being compiled in a forthcoming book, Rain on the Monte Bello Ridge, a memoir about health, aging and winemaking. Early release chapters are already available for those who sign up for his free newsletter at https://gemello.substack.com/.
About the Adobe Building: The historic Mountain View Adobe Building was built in 1934 as a New Deal Civic Works Administration project during the Great Depression. It served as Mountain View’s first publicly-owned community center, hosting countless gatherings, dances, celebrations, meetings, and classes for generations of Mountain View residents. The Adobe is the traditional home of the MVHA’s quarterly meetings/events and our organization led the “Save the Adobe” campaign in the late 1990s which supported the building’s full restoration in 2001. The COVID-19 pandemic has kept us away from the Adobe for over two years, and we are excited to return!
