From roaring speedways across Europe to the rolling vineyards of Tuscany, Antonio Sanguineti’s life has come full circle through speedometers and wine.

The race car driver-turned-winemaker who pressed accelerators and the pace for nearly 20 years is now pressing grapes. He made a pit stop Wednesday at Monica’s Waterfront Bakery and Café.

“Making wine is a challenge, like a race,” Sanguineti said. “You need to have a good team, you need to have focus, you have to concentrate on what you’re able to do — I’m not able to fix an engine, but I know how to drive a car — so it’s the same exact thing when you make wine; you have to have focus, you want to go straight to the point and you have a dream.”

Born in Milan, Italy, Sanguineti spent the first 15 years of his life pruning, digging and harvesting grapes for his family’s wine business. At 15, he discovered an affinity for “the wheel” when he began racing go-carts. Sanguineti’s father, also an avid racer, sent him to racing school where he drove Porsches, earning a position with the Porsche Club of Italy, a professional racing circuit.

For the better part of two decades, Sanguineti raced cars while tending to the family business. In time, however, he decided to launch his own winemaking business, a smaller production he shared with friends and fellow vineyard owners.

Now a recreational driver, Sanguineti spends most of his time tending to his wine.

“I feel like the grandfather of today’s drivers,” he said.

Sanguineti’s visit to Monica’s included a tasting of two of his seven small-vineyard wines, allowing fellow connoisseurs to taste rare reds while racking the mind of an experienced winemaker.

The bakery and café, owned and operated by Monica and Mark Downen, is sponsoring an eight-day food and wine tour Oct. 7-14 that will include visits to small-vineyard estates, cooking classes, balsamic vinegar and olive oil tasting and cultural events. The tour was organized by the West Seattle-based Small Vineyards Travel, to which Sanguineti belongs. An additional tour is scheduled for October 2010 because response has been so great.

“These are family owned, hand-harvested, earth-friendly, very small, small estates,” Doumina Whyman, director of SVT, said of the tour. “There are great wines you’ve never heard of. This is really to showcase how hard small families work.”

Bakery owner Monica Downen said small vineyards such as Sanguineti’s — he produces about 6,000 cases per year — possess some of the best wines in the world. She imports only Sanguineti’s wine and a few wines from small vineyards around Washington.

“I pick the most unique of their wines; the ones that I can only get limited amounts of,” Downen said. “I think it’s important for my business to be unique in that way. Anybody who comes here to buy wine, they’re not going to find it anywhere else.”