On a recent Saturday afternoon, a woman walked her dog past a muffler shop, a self-storage facility, and a stretch of chain-link fence before arriving at a wine garden where a Ferrari and a vintage Porsche sat parked under shade sails next to a folding table pouring estate Cabernet. Nobody around her seemed to think this was strange. In San Carlos, it isn't.
Everyone who has spent five minutes researching this city already knows about Laurel Street. The farmers market, the new Neapolitan pizza spot, the Art & Wine Faire every October. What almost nobody mentions is that a few blocks away, tucked into the working industrial pocket along Washington Street and Industrial Road, San Carlos runs a second wine scene that has nothing to do with downtown at all. It has its own name, its own regulars, and as of last winter, one fewer stop than it used to have.
A Trail That Calls Itself That
Russian Ridge Winery, a father-and-son operation run by Scott and Spencer Townsend out of a tasting room at 919 Washington Street, describes its own neighborhood as "centrally located on the Mid-Peninsula Wine Trail." That is not marketing copy dreamed up for a blog post. It is how the winery itself frames its address, and it is accurate. Within a few blocks of Russian Ridge sit Cuvée Wine Cellars, Domenico Winery, and AutoVino, an event venue that combines a working car museum with an onsite winery. None of it faces Laurel Street. All of it sits in what Russian Ridge's own site calls the Industrial Arts District, a stretch of San Carlos built for auto repair and light manufacturing that quietly became a place to spend a Saturday afternoon.
The Townsends started making wine together in Alameda in the late 1990s, moved their operation to San Carlos, and spent two years working out of Cuvée Wine Cellars before opening their own tasting room in 2011. Russian Ridge pours weekend flights Saturday and Sunday from 1 to 5 p.m., with an added evening session on the last Friday of every month from 5 to 8 p.m. A few doors down, Cuvée Wine Cellars runs a smaller operation. Reviewers describe it as easy to miss unless you already know it is there, a tasting room and front patio run by winemaker Paul, who sources grapes from vineyards across central and northern California rather than growing his own.
The Stretch That Actually Has the Wineries
Walk or drive a few minutes further to Industrial Road and the density picks up. Domenico Winery, at 1697 Industrial Road, has been on this block since 2004, when Dominick and Gloria Giovinazzo bought a building here and started what became Domenico Winery and the Bacchus Winemaking Club, a program that lets amateur winemakers blend and bottle their own labels. A major renovation between 2017 and 2019 split the building into separate spaces for tastings, private events, and the Osteria, a restaurant and wine bar open Wednesday through Sunday that pours Cal-Italia varietals the winery has been producing for more than two decades. Domenico also runs its own calendar independent of anything happening downtown, including an Annual Orphan Barrel Tasting that drew a crowd to the winery on a Sunday afternoon this past March.
Then there is AutoVino, at 380 Industrial Road, directly across Highway 101 from the In-N-Out Burger at the Holly Street exit. AutoVino is licensed as a working winery under the Woodside Vineyards label, and the wine itself traces back further than anything else on this stretch. Bob Mullen, one of the venue's co-founders, started producing wine from a little more than an acre of grapes on Kings Mountain Road in Woodside in 1960, when California had 121 licensed wineries. The state now has more than 4,200. AutoVino's current operations are run by the Giurlani family, with Phil Giurlani serving as chief operating officer, overseeing everything from the car storage business to the weekend wine garden.
What makes AutoVino different from a standard tasting room is that it does not try to be one. The venue pairs its estate Cabernet, Chardonnay, Zinfandel, and Pinot Noir with a rotating collection of vintage and exotic cars, and food comes out of a restored 1955 Flxible diner bus fitted with an oak-fired oven that reaches 900 degrees. Every third Sunday, the venue hosts Cars & Cabernet, drawing more than 100 collector vehicles, Ferraris and Lamborghinis parked alongside vintage roadsters and custom builds, with owners standing next to their own cars rather than roped off behind velvet stanchions. Every Friday evening, a smaller version runs as Happy Hour, with live music, wood-fired pizza, and a rotating list of local bands playing everything from classic rock to country. Dogs are welcome at both. So are kids.
The One That Isn't There Anymore
For years, Flying Suitcase Wines sat at 915 Washington Street, close enough to Russian Ridge that the two were routinely mentioned together as neighbors on the same trail. It was a small operation, producing around 1,000 cases of red, white, and rosé a year from grapes sourced across California, family-run and known for a kids' play area that made it an easy stop for parents who wanted a glass of wine without arranging a sitter.
Flying Suitcase closed permanently on December 21, 2025. The winery's own website confirms the closure with a short note thanking customers for their support over the years. It is the kind of change that would not show up in a generic neighborhood roundup, because most of what gets written about San Carlos still treats the wine trail as a fixed list rather than something that shifts. If you have not been out to Washington Street since last fall, the lineup you remember is not quite the lineup that exists now.
Reading the Trail as a Loop
None of this requires a special trip. Russian Ridge and the former Flying Suitcase space sit within a block of Devil's Canyon Brewing Company at 935 Washington Street, which runs its own calendar of comedy nights and themed tastings. From there it is a short drive or a longer walk to the Industrial Road cluster, where Domenico's Osteria, Cuvée, and AutoVino sit close enough together that a Saturday afternoon can move from one to the next without much planning. Free parking at AutoVino makes it an easy anchor point if you are coming by car rather than on foot.
What ties the whole stretch together is that none of it is trying to look like downtown. There is no pedestrian plaza here, no string lights over a closed street. It is auto body shops and self-storage units with a handful of tasting rooms and one very well-stocked car museum threaded through them, and it works because nobody involved is pretending otherwise. Laurel Street gets the festival banners and the newspaper coverage. This is where a fair number of San Carlos residents actually spend a Saturday.
If you already live here, none of this changes anything about your address. It just means the next time someone asks what there is to do in San Carlos on a weekend, the honest answer might not start on Laurel Street at all.
Whenever you are ready to talk about what your San Carlos home is worth in today's market, or what it would take to find the right property in this city, Lynn North is happy to walk through it with you. Schedule a free consultation and home valuation whenever the timing works for you.