This Card Saved Us Over 30% on Our Favorite Napa Valley Wines
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Last Updated: 12/09/2020
How We Took Advantage of the Best Deal on Caymus Wine
It’s not too often that you get to stack and hack deals with things you truly love, and brands you sincerely enjoy supporting. That’s exactly what happened this fall when American Express added an Amex Offer for $30 off of $150 or more with Caymus Wines, effectively 20% off just with the Amex Offer alone! While this might sound like just another random wine-related Amex Offer, there's it’s actually much more to this story. From discovering this wine almost a decade ago while traveling on a cruise to saving over 30% in 2020!
Discovering Caymus Wine on a Royal Caribbean Cruise
Back in July 2011, my now wife and I took a cruise to the Western Caribbean with my family aboard the Royal Caribbean Freedom of the Seas. It was on this cruise as we sailed from Cape Canaveral, FL to Grand Cayman that we discovered a featured wine, which turned out to be the infamous Caymus Cabernet. Intrigued, we used a complimentary wine tasting perk that came with my Royal Caribbean Emerald status to sample this wine and instantly fell in love. We were in college at the time, and the mere thought of being able to afford to spend $80+ on a single bottle of wine seemed like a life goal at the time. We grew obsessed with the name and brand “Caymus” as it sounds similar to “Cayman” in our minds, both of which are synonymous with the finer things in life for us.
Sailing on a Royal Caribbean cruise in the Caribbean
Our First Outing During the Pandemic Was to Caymus Vineyards in Napa
Fast forward to 2020, and we found ourselves using the Resy app (now owned by American Express) to make wine tasting reservations at the Caymus winery in Napa, only an hour and a half drive north of where we live on the San Francisco peninsula. This was our first outing since the COVID-19 pandemic went into full swing in March 2020, so we were very excited when we had the opportunity to visit Napa in June 2020. Caymus generously offered guests a complimentary tasting that month, which is normally $50 per person. Since then, they’ll comp the $50 per person tasting fee if you spend more than that on wine purchases. It’s pretty much a win-win because if you go all the way to Napa, you have to come home with a couple of bottles to enjoy later!
After over 3 months of being at home with California's COVID-19 lockdown, it was an incredible experience to drive up to Napa and taste some of the valley's most delicious wines at Caymus!
Why Caymus Vineyards is Significant to Napa Valley
Since our first Napa wine tasting at Caymus, we’ve made numerous trips back to visit and have found ourselves quite biased to the Wagner Family of wines. They offer wines starting under $20 all the way up to the special reserve Cabernet, which goes for $185, not to mention a few bubbly options along the way. As for the overall brand itself, Caymus is still privately owned by the Wagner Family, which makes it one of the oldest and few wineries that remain family-owned. In this day and age, most of the wineries you’ve heard of in Napa are owned by large corporations that are publicly traded on Wall Street. While I can appreciate the capital needed to successfully run a wine business, I really enjoy tasting a piece of the deeply rooted Napa history of a family-owned small business.
Caymus Vinyards is located at 8700 Conn Creek Rd, Rutherford, CA 94573, in the heart of the Napa Valley.
The Caymus Wine Amex Offer
Now that you understand why this is more than just your average run-of-the-mill American Express offer, let’s dive into the deal. First off, we found this offer was given to both my and my wife's American Express accounts. That means if you have multiple card members in your household, you could quickly scale your savings from $30 off of $150 to $60 off of $300. It’s important to note that Caymus wines rarely have any sort of discount at the winery or at your local BevMo or Total Wine. For us, that makes this Amex Offer even tastier! Here are the cards that we were able to choose from to add it to:
Since we first saw it on The Platinum Card, we went ahead and added it there. A few days later it appeared as an offer for my account as well and I could pick which card I wanted to add it to.
This American Express Offer instantly saves us $30, bringing even more value to keeping The Platinum Card in our wallet.
What’s the Best Credit Card for Purchasing Wine?
When it comes to buying wine, you’ll find that regardless of whether you buy it online or in-person from the winery, it’ll most likely code on your credit card as “merchandise” or another type of general spend category. That means that, unfortunately, you most likely won’t get the 4X Dining or 4X U.S. Supermarket bonus from the American Express® Gold Card. It’s also unlikely that you’ll get the 3X Ultimate Reward points with the Chase Sapphire Reserve card. So what do you do?
The best credit cards for earning points when buying wine are the Chase Freedom Unlimited, which will earn 1.5X Ultimate Reward points per dollar spent, and the American Express Blue Business Plus card, which earns 2X Membership Rewards per dollar spent!
How the Deal Went Down
Okay, so let’s get down to the brass tacks. Caymus was offering a deal for their virtual tasting on December 11, 2020. That deal offered $208 worth of wine for $175 plus tax, and shipping for only $5 instead of $23. The $175 amount was more than enough to trigger the Amex Offer of a $30 statement credit when spending $150 or more. Here’s the breakdown:
+ $208 Caymus Virtual Tasting Retail Cost
- $33 Caymus promotional discount
= $175 Caymus Virtual Tasting Cost
+ $23.71 shipping
- $18.71 Caymus shipping discount
+$16.19 Tax
= $196.19 Total Card Charge
- $30 Amex Offer Statement Credit
= $166.19 Total Cost
Now even though we didn’t earn a bonus multiplier on the points, we still earned 1X on Platinum Card® from American Express.
166 Membership Reward Points at 2.0 CPP (Cents Per Point, or $0.02) = $3.32 in value
+ $166.19 Total Cost
- $3.32 Membership Reward points
= $162.87 Final Net Cost
The Caymus virtual wine tasting offered the perfect opportunity to stack this Amex Offer with a promotion from the winery.
The Final Point
Overall, by timing the Amex Offer with the Caymus virtual tasting promotion and using our Amex Offer, we paid $163 for what would’ve otherwise cost us approximately $232!. That’s a savings of 30% off! If we had paid for this using cash, a debit card, or even cash, we would’ve had to pay the full $232 for these 4 bottles of wine. This really goes to show how using the right card, stacked with the right Amex Offers, and a little help from a winery promotion can add up to save you real money!
If you have Platinum Card® from American Express or another American Express card, we’d love to know what your favorite Amex offer is! Let us know by DMing us on Instagram, or by messaging us on Facebook!