My Amex-subsidized Martha Stewart wine tally thus far: 12 bottles for $39

While I’m busy waiting for American Airlines to release some more low-level award space, the most interesting thing in the credit card world lately has been this Martha Stewart wine deal. Frequent Miler originally brought it to my attention, and for the few of you who hadn’t heard yet you get $40 off a $50 order from Martha Stewart’s wine operation (for each Amex card you register, wink wink nudge nudge), which puts some nice deals into play.

The first deal I did was courtesy of commenter Bryan on that Frequent Miler post: it’s 6 bottles for $59.99 with free shipping. Here’s the link. My total including taxes was $64.34, so after the $40 discount it was 6 for a little over $24, or roughly $4 a bottle! I’m pretty agreeable when it comes to wine: most of it tastes pretty good to me, except for Two Buck Chuck and low-end Costa Rican wine (never again!). I don’t usually pay much for wine (see here for some quality low-budget recommendations), but $4 is about as cheap as it gets, so that’s a win. Even Two Buck Chuck was $3 last time I looked.

The second deal was brought to my attention by Miles to Memories, which pointed out that there’s a promo code, MARTHA25, which gets you $25 off a $50 order and gives you free shipping. So I ordered the Worldly Whites 6-pack in order to demonstrate to future guests of Chateau PFD that I am indeed worldly. After discounts and tax it came out to be $14.72, an even better deal than the first. And the second batch of wines had a higher retail price than the first so you know that they’re better, because that’s how wine works.

Unfortunately, nobody was around the first two times UPS delivered the worldly whites. On the third day, nobody came. The order tracking website said “YOUR PACKAGE WAS DAMAGED IN TRANSIT. WE WILL NOTIFY THE SENDER WITH DETAILS. / ALL MERCHANDISE DISCARDED.” Poor wine! I emailed Martha Stewart Wine and they responded within 30 minutes to let me know they were sending out another shipment. Great customer service and I didn’t even have to let them know that I am an extremely important, highly influential blogger. Well, done, MS Wine!

By this point, some of you may be wondering if the is wine any good. I am pleased to report that yes, the wine is perfectly good wine, not to mention a great value given how much we paid. So far we’ve tried one red and one white and we liked both of them. But we don’t drink too much wine so it’s going to be a while before I can give a comprehensive assessment.

Another question you may have: what about the portals? When this deal first came out, TopCashBack was offering 12% back but that disappeared pretty quickly. I’ve checked the portals semi-regularly since then and Martha Stewart Wine appeared for one day on something called Coupon Cactus but other than I haven’t seen any more portal discounts. I’ve also been hoping that they’d send out some kind of deal to customers via email but so far I haven’t seen anything.

And that is where things stand today. This offer is good until the end of September, so there’s plenty of time to sit back and wait for another good deal to pair with the $40/$50 discount.