Drive south on Industrial Road past Holly Street, across from the In-N-Out everyone in San Carlos has eaten at more times than they'd admit, and you'll pass a building that gives you nothing. No sign worth noticing. No windows to speak of. If you had to guess, you'd guess self-storage, or maybe a contractor's warehouse. Most people who drive that stretch every week have never once wondered what's behind the door.
What's behind the door is a working winery. Not a wine bar. Not a tasting room that buys grapes from somewhere else and slaps a label on it. An actual winery, producing and aging its own wine on-site under the Woodside Vineyards name, tucked inside a building that also happens to store some of the finest exotic and vintage cars on the Peninsula. The place is called AutoVino, and depending on when you show up, it's either the quietest corner of Industrial Road or the loudest Friday night in the city.
How a Car Guy and a Winemaker Ended Up in the Same Building
The story starts in 2010, at a Ferrari dealership in Redwood City. Buff Giurlani, whose family ran an olive oil import business in San Francisco and who'd been chasing fast Italian cars his whole life, got introduced to Bob Mullen, a fixture of California's boutique winery movement going back decades. One conversation turned into a business partnership, and the partnership turned into AutoVino, a name that translates simply from Italian: cars and wine.
Buff's son Phil now runs day-to-day operations alongside him, handling everything from private event bookings to the Friday lunch crowd. But the winemaking side of the operation predates the car side by nearly half a century. The Woodside Vineyards label poured at AutoVino traces back to a winery that's been producing since 1963, which by most local accounts makes it one of the oldest continuously operating wineries in San Mateo County. That's not a marketing flourish stapled onto a car museum. It's the other way around. The wine came first.
The Wine Isn't a Prop
It would be easy to assume the wine at a place built around Lamborghinis and vintage roadsters is an afterthought, something poured to justify calling it an event venue instead of a garage. It isn't. The Kings Mountain Cabernet, the Chardonnay, the Pinot Noir and Zinfandel served in the Wine Garden are all estate-grown and aged on-site in French and American oak barrels, sold by the glass, bottle, or case during Friday tastings and the monthly open house. If you know the Santa Cruz Mountains appellation, you'll recognize the style. If you don't, you'll just notice it's better than you expected from a building with a garage door for a front entrance.
Two Different Nights, Same Building
AutoVino runs on two distinct rhythms, and knowing the difference matters if you're deciding when to actually go.
Friday Night Happy Hour happens every week, typically 4:30 to 7:00 p.m., under shade sails in the outdoor Wine Garden. This is the low-key version: a rotating cast of local acts, from party bands like The Wanderers running through classic rock and pop, to solo country sets from Chris Bigford, to full Americana lineups from groups like the Whiskey Hill Billies with banjo, mandolin, and three-part harmonies. The food comes out of a restored 1955 Flxible diner bus parked permanently on site, where a pizzaiolo named Nate hand-stretches dough that's fermented for 48 hours before it goes into a wood-fired oven hot enough to blister a Neapolitan crust in under two minutes. Charcuterie boards, wings, and tri-tip round out the menu. Seating is limited, so the regulars know to show up before 5:30. Leashed dogs are welcome, and the two resident Labradors, Daisy and Honey, tend to end up as unofficial hosts.
Cars & Cabernet is the monthly version, held the third Sunday of every month, and it's a different animal entirely. Instead of a handful of cars parked around the Wine Garden, more than 100 vehicles show up on a given Sunday, brought by their owners rather than staged by the venue. Ferraris next to muscle cars next to track-built customs, arranged with no ropes and no barriers, so you can walk the rows and strike up a conversation with whoever owns the car you're staring at. The event officially runs until 4:00 p.m., though the crowd thins out by early afternoon once people have had lunch and made their rounds. Parking is free. If you're bringing a car to display, the advice from regulars is to arrive before 11:00 a.m. if you want a good spot, because the good spots fill on a first-come basis.
The two events pull different crowds for a reason. Friday night is a wind-down, the kind of thing you do on a whim because you're driving home anyway. The Sunday event is a destination, something people plan their weekend around, whether they're bringing a car or just going to look.
Why This Works as a Habit and Not a Novelty
Plenty of only-in-your-town spots exist as a one-time curiosity. You go once, take a photo, and never come back. AutoVino doesn't function that way, and the reason comes down to how little friction there is in showing up.
There's no reservation system for either event. No cover charge. No dress code that would make you feel out of place in whatever you were already wearing. You can walk in for one glass of wine and leave twenty minutes later, or you can stay through both a lunch and a set of live music. The car displays have no barriers, which means the thing that would normally feel exclusive, standing three feet from a Lamborghini, instead feels like standing in someone's driveway while they show off a project they're proud of. That's a deliberate choice, not an accident, and it's the same choice that turns a car storage facility into a recurring Friday habit instead of a bucket-list stop.
It also helps that AutoVino isn't trying to be the only thing you do that night. If you've already made a stop on Laurel Street for dinner, AutoVino is a short drive off 101, close enough to fold into an evening rather than plan an entire one around it.
What This Means for Your Calendar
If you've lived in San Carlos for years and have never been inside that building on Industrial Road, the easiest entry point is a Friday Happy Hour. Show up around 5:00, grab a glass of Chardonnay or Kings Mountain Cabernet, order a pizza off the diner bus, and see who's playing that week. If you want the fuller version, wait for the third Sunday of the month and go to Cars & Cabernet, when the lot fills with more machinery than most car shows twice its size manage to gather.
Either way, you'll have solved a small local mystery: what's actually behind that unmarked door across from the In-N-Out. Turns out it's one of the county's oldest wineries, run by a family that got into cars and wine from opposite directions and somehow ended up running both out of the same warehouse.
If you're the kind of San Carlos resident who likes knowing what's actually happening in the buildings you drive past every day, that's the same instinct that makes for a good conversation about the neighborhood itself. I write about this stuff because I live here too, and I like knowing the answers before someone asks me the question. If you ever want to talk about what's changing in San Carlos, big or small, Bob Bredel is one call away.
