San Diego – Wine Tasting and the USS Midway

Dates: March 13 – 27, 2017
Summary:  While visiting San Diego, we meet up with some new friends for a professional wine tasting party and hit up the USS Midway.  

What does a wine tasting party and the USS Midway have in common? Well, if they’re both done right, they are done by a sommelier, and we happened to meet and befriend that sommelier back up in Sonoma County 5 months earlier.

How We Met

  ​We met Chris and his wife at the tasting bar at Korbel Cellars back in November when we were staying just north of San Francisco. We got to chatting while we sipped our bubbly and had a mutual fascination for the other’s job – us being travel bloggers and he being the Bar Manager on the USS Midway.

Besides giving us a GIGANTIC list of places to stop and see on our way down the coast, he gave us his contact info to get in touch when we got to San Diego and he’d hook us up with some passes to get on the USS Midway. We told him not to offer things unless he meant it, because we were totally going to get in touch. 

Wine Tasting Party

We reached out to Chris when we reached San Diego, and being that it was 5 months later he was surprised but very excited to hear from us! He invited us to a wine tasting party that he was hosting at his house. ​We showed up not really knowing what to expect, but these guys were serious wine tasters. They had tasting note sheets and could tell you so many things about a particular wine without even tasting it. 

  To become a sommelier, you have to take a series of tests. There are different tests for different levels, and at the different levels your palette needs to be able to detect more and more details about the wine – region the grapes were grown in, altitude and climate it was grown at, grape varietals in the wine, age, alcohol percentage, and more. ​

We had two people in our group getting ready for the level 2 test, and we learned more about wine from them in that one evening than in our years of going to tasting rooms!

USS Midway

​We were super excited to check out the USS Midway, and it was even better because our RVer friends David and Francesca came with us!

  The USS Midway is a maritime museum in the form of a retired/decommissioned aircraft carrier that served from 1945-1992 and is now semi-permanently docked at the Navy Pier in downtown San Diego. The ship houses many exhibits and an extensive collection of  aircraft for various eras.

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  This ship was HUGE, and we could have easily spent longer than the 3-4 hours we did, but our feet were so tired from walking the length of the ship and through the corridors of the underbelly that we had to call it quits before we collapsed. Chris who worked there told us that he can easily walk 15 miles in a day working there, especially when they hold events on board.

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Everything Explored

​We want to send a big warm THANK YOU to our friend Chris for the wine party and the USS Midway! We absolutely love how we’ve met so many awesome people in our travels that serendipitously show up later in our travels and make such a big impact on our experiences and lives. Here’s a BIG KISS from us! 😉 Statue of the famous V-day kiss, located next to the USS Midway

More from Mortons on the Move:

• Campground Review: Paradise By The Sea Beach RV Resort, Oceanside CA
• Things To Do in Charleston
• All Who Wander Aren’t Lost – Full-Time RVer Community
• Our Southwestern Terminus, San Diego – Gaslamp District, Balboa Park, & Rancho Santa Fe
• Napa Valley & Tiny Houses

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