A racing museum
that happens to pour wine.

You almost drive past it. The corner of Jenschke and 290 doesn’t announce itself the way Becker does a few minutes back, and the building gives nothing away from the road — a pair of dark-timber gables, a clean stone breezeway, the kind of modern barn that has gone up all over the Hill Country in the last decade. Directly across the street sits a winery and a brewery, both named Fat Ass, which tells you something about the neighborhood’s sense of humor before you’ve even parked.

You walk in expecting a tasting bar. You get an Indy car instead — and then a hall full of them: a stock car, a dirt-track roadster, a wall-sized black-and-white photograph of a man squinting out from inside a Goodyear helmet. The wine is here too, but it has its own room. The museum is one space and the tasting room and bar are another, and parked in the seam between them sits a red-and-white show car you’re invited to climb into, posted under the illuminated FOYT sign and that helmet portrait. The cars find you first because the cars are what greet you at the door.

On the afternoon we visited, we nearly had the place to ourselves. That turns out to be the gift. There’s no line, no crush of a bachelorette party, no host racing a clipboard — just a lot of quiet, polished concrete, and time to actually look at the cars. Somewhere in that quiet, Jim found us.

It’s worth being honest about the proportions up front: this is a museum that happens to serve wine, not a winery that happens to have memorabilia. Get the order right and the whole stop makes sense.

A racing museum first — with California wines that are genuinely very good.

Plenty of Texas wineries hang a few photos and call it a theme. Foyt is the rare one where the theme came first and the tasting room got built around it. The cars are real — A.J. Foyt’s actual machines and others from across American motorsport — laid out on the concrete with velvet ropes and little placards, the way a museum does it, not the way a gift shop does it. A small framed sign asks that children not be left unsupervised in the museum, which is not a sentence most tasting rooms ever need to write.

That’s the honest answer to why stop here instead of the winery next door: you can’t see these cars anywhere else on 290. You can walk a timeline of Foyt’s career down one wall, stand over a land-speed record car, and look straight into the torn-open carbon tub of a car that went into a wall and came back out in pieces. The cars are what make the stop unmissable — and then the wine turns out to be better than it needs to be.

One thing the labels make clear in the fine print: these are not Texas wines. The Foyt Collection sources its fruit from Napa and Sonoma and bottles in California — which is exactly why the pours land more polished, and more expensive, than the average Hill Country stop. So don’t come for terroir or estate vines. Come for the cars, the man who walks you through them, and a glass that genuinely holds its own.

The blue No. 14 is the one that stops you — A.J. Foyt Racing’s stars-and-stripes IndyCar in its Homes For Our Troops livery, posed with a glass garage door rolled up behind it so the polished bodywork glows against the field outside. Beside it sits the red-and-white No. 4 you’re invited to climb into, with the helmet portrait of Foyt watching over the whole lobby.

From there the collection runs in every direction motorsport goes. A purple-and-yellow stock car parked dead center. A low red dirt-track roadster with skinny tires, the kind of car that built the legend before the Indy 500 did. A silver Aerotech Oldsmobile streamliner stretched out under a poster reading World’s Fastest Moving Car Company — a genuine land-speed record machine. And the one that lingers: a carbon-fiber tub from a wreck, displayed exactly as the crash left it, peeled open and jagged, a quiet argument about what these drivers actually risked. There’s a racing simulator and a wall-length career timeline if you want the full story. Most of it, Jim will tell you himself.

Ask for Jim.

Off the bar there’s a striking private room — a long live-edge slab table under a crystal chandelier, driver helmets mounted on a deep-navy wall around a bronze relief of a racer. It’s the kind of space you photograph on the way past. But the room isn’t what we remember — Jim is. He moved between the wine and the cars without missing a beat, the kind of host who clearly enjoys the place he works and wants you to enjoy it too. Walk out and you’ll be repeating his stories at the next stop.

The pace is unhurried; cheese and charcuterie are available as an upgrade, and that’s about the extent of the food. On a slow afternoon the whole thing feels less like a transaction than a friend showing you his garage. The facility is handsome. The people are better — and at Foyt, the people are the visit.

So, the wine. Here’s the honest surprise: it’s good — noticeably better than the average Hill Country pour. These aren’t Texas bottlings dressed up in racing labels; they’re polished, not-inexpensive California wines sourced from Napa and Sonoma, and the refinement shows in the glass. You’re not paying for novelty. You’re paying for real wine that happens to arrive with a story.

And the stories are the best back-label reading on 290. Each bottle carries one. Our favorite was the 2023 No. 97 Texas Justice — a Sonoma County red, 50% Syrah with 33% Grenache and 17% Mourvèdre — whose label recounts the 1997 inaugural race at Texas Motor Speedway, where Billy Boat took the checkered flag first in Foyt’s No. 14. Runner-up Arie Luyendyk burst into victory lane arguing he’d won; a scuffle followed; Arie, the label notes drily, ended up in the flowerbeds. In a controversial decision Arie was awarded the race — but A.J. kept the trophy. It signs off the way the whole place does: “Come and get it.”

Buy a bottle for the story and drink it for the wine. Both hold up.

Even the patio is keeping the theme.

Out back, the outdoor space is small but committed to the bit. Even the patio looks like it belongs at a racetrack: alternating squares of turf and pale stone laid out across the lawn like an oversized checkered flag, with low grey sectionals, a teak table or two, and umbrellas in black and racing orange. Past the rail the land just opens up flat and green toward the highway.

It’s a fine place to sit, but manage your expectations — seating is limited and the shade runs out quickly, so the patio is more for a glass and a breather than a long lingering afternoon. Which is consistent with everything else here: the experience is the building and the cars, not the acreage.