About Andy
When one of the largest bicycle companies in the world sued a small Novato family winery over its name, it picked the wrong family. In 2009, Trek Bicycle Corporation took Andy Podshadley and his two-year-old winery to federal court. The safe play was to settle, rename, and walk away. Andy refused. The family stood their ground against a corporate legal team a thousand times their size, and in 2010 a federal judge threw the case out, writing that the winery's handful of sales could not possibly have confused anyone. The winery on Machin Avenue still proudly bears the name Trek, because Andy Podshadley does not back down from a just fight.
That fight did not come from nowhere. Raised in Novato by a single mother who taught him the value of hard work, Andy grew up in local public schools, earned the rank of Eagle Scout in 1979, and worked his way to a business degree at Sonoma State. He built A&J Services, a contracting company, from nothing in 1984, then climbed the wine industry ladder from the tasting room floor at Gloria Ferrer to management at one of the largest wine companies in the world.
In 2007, after seventeen years of award-winning amateur winemaking with his wife Liz, the family bet everything on a dream and founded Trek Winery. City hall tested them next, turning down their first downtown locations. Andy kept looking. In 2012 he opened on Machin Avenue in a 1940s building he renovated largely with his own hands, family, friends, and local high school students.
The bet paid off for all of Novato. Trek became a downtown anchor: weddings, Battle of the Bands, an annual fundraiser for the Novato Theater, and benefits for neighbors facing medical crises. In 2017, the same City Council that once turned him away honored Trek as Novato Small Business of the Year, and today his son Michael brews beer under the same roof where his father makes wine.
Andy's leadership has never needed a title. When he and Liz opened downtown, the business association that collected mandatory dues from them never even told them when its board met. Most people would complain. Andy took the troubled association over in 2014 and rebuilt it: he and Liz walked the entire district door to door, packed meetings that used to draw no one, posted every agenda online, and raised more than $54,000 from 94 sponsors without taking another dime from members. He led it for eight years and created the beloved New Year's Eve Bouncy Ball celebration along the way.
“Instead of complaining, I wanted to make a change.” — Andy, Marin Independent Journal, 2015
He coached high school and youth basketball, served as Scoutmaster, led Lutheran community organizations, and spends his quiet hours rehabilitating injured raptors and returning them to the wild. A self-described “fiscally conservative and morally liberal” independent, he refuses to fit a party mold.
That same persistence defines his public service. He ran for Assembly and for City Council, each time as the underdog against better-funded, establishment-backed opponents, and each time he came back stronger. With no paid staff and an all-volunteer team, his 2026 campaign earned a place in the November runoff for County Supervisor on a simple promise: hope with accountability for the homeless, fairness for small businesses, real pathways to citizenship for immigrants, and a county government that answers to its residents.