Mermaid Winery
September 9, 2023. Mermaid Winery of Norfolk and Virginia Beach advertises itself as Virginia’s “first urban winery.” Certainly, we have not encountered a downtown wine production facility that also offers such a great menu. We have visited hole-in-the wall “winery” storefronts that beg the description of gourmet; and we have visited “wineries” that do nothing but sell stuff grown, produced and bottled by others with no value added. Mermaid has both production and ambience. We met our nephew and his wife, K and S, at Mermaid for a Saturday night dinner. K, a Naval officer, recently relocated to Norfolk with S. We hoped a nice dinner would give them a break from opening moving boxes all day. Mermaid has two locations. The original “flagship” location in the Ghent neighborhood of downtown Norfolk opened in 2013. We opted to visit the second location in the Chic’s Beach area of Virginia Beach on Shore Drive. This opened in 2018.