Small Business Saturday

This is a rather complicated topic, but it's covered in depth by a myriad of bloggers.  I'll cover the highlights, and then point you to another blogger for the gory mechanics.

Amex allows 4 cards per person- that includes both business and personal.  You can also add Authorized Users.  I have 4 Amex cards, and my wife is an Authorized user on all of them.  Plus, I have a Serve card, totaling 9 Amex cards.

Amex has "Offers for You" on your online account page at the bottom.  You can "Save" the offer to your card, and then use the card and get the cash rebate.  The problem is that once you Save the offer, it typically disappears from your other Amex cards.  Also, you can only Save the Offer to the primary user's card- not an Authorized user.

The other way to get the Offer is to "Synch" your Amex card to a Social Network (Twitter or Facebook), and get the offer that way.  If you have multiple cards, it can be quite cumbersome to get the offers on to all of your cards.  With Twitter (I haven't tried using Facebook), you simply Tweet the hashtag Amex specifies for the offer from the Twitter account associated with your Amex card (detailed steps in link below).

When there is no hastag, I recently tried opening multiple browser tabs with the Offers for You displayed for each of my cards.  Then I clicked on Save Offer in each tab.  This actually worked for me, but fat-fingered one of them.  So I did get the offer saved to 3 of my cards.  But this doesn't get it onto your Authorized User cards.

The best way to get the offers onto all of your cards quickly is when Amex specifies a hashtag to use to save the offer to your cards.  You can then use Tweetdeck to send a single Tweet from multiple Twitter accounts with just a few mouse clicks, and you're done!

Rather than repeat the steps here, a fellow blogger, Frequent Miler, did a nice job describing how to do this in his post "Create an Amex Sync Machine".

Now that all 9 of my cards have the Small Business Offer saved, I'm going to use my 9 cards to eat a nice dinner at a local restaurant, buy a $100 gift card at a local restaurant, and buy a couple of 2010 Barolo's ($50 each) at my local wine store.

I'll even get the points on the Amex cards!  Now that's really Wine & Miles!!

Happy Thanksgiving!

The Hosemaster is a former sommelier, and a very funny blogger.

Here's a snippet from his post "Perfect Thanksgiving Wines to Match Your Family's Dysfunction":
"Does your family constantly squabble about money? Bring a very young Barolo and make a point to remark how tight it is. Maybe you have to spend your day listening to the racist remarks of a family member. What could be better than an insipid Pinot Grigio? “A stupid white for a stupid white,” makes for a lovely opening prayer. "

I always stick with American wines for Thanksgiving, and always open a variety, so our guests can try a few and find something they like.

My wife enjoys sparkling wine, though I do get annoyed when I buy an expensive bottle and she puts orange juice in it, but heck- it's Thanksgiving!

Here's what I'm serving:
Bubbly: brought by our guests
White: 2011 Ceritas Chardonnay Heintz Vineyard
Syrah: 2009 Jemrose Cardiac
Field Blend: 2010 Bedrock Pagani
Pinot: 2010 Rivers-Marie Sonoma Coast
Cabernet: 2007 Boudreaux

Hope you and yours have a "functional" Thanksgiving!

$30 is the new $60

With the amazing 2012, 2013 and 2014 vintages in California, I see no reason to spend $60 on a cabernet any more.

I was recently at a couple of tasting rooms near Murphy's, and the tasting rooms were still pouring 2010s and 2011s.  They must have a huge warehouse filled with more recent vintages, but need to sell the older vintages first.

I even received an offer for a 2010 Syrah from a well-known brand at a very discounted price.

I'm going to be picky about what I buy and you should too.

Paul Martin's Amex Synch

If you have an American Express card ("Amex"), you should be taking advantage of their "synch offers".  As with other topics in this blog, I'll defer to the myriad of other bloggers to tell you how to do this.  I  use Tweetdeck (again, well explained by others) to synch all of my cards at once.

I probably find a good deal once per quarter, and today I found Paul Martin's- $25 off $50.

One problem with the Amex synch is that if you do it on the web site and synch one of your cards, the offer usually disappears from all of your other cards.  So I'm going to wait a few days to see if the twitter synch shows up, before synching any of my cards.

There's a Paul Martin's that opened near me recently, and my wife and I have gone there several times for Happy Hour, and once for dinner.  At Happy Hour, they have some nice appetizers at decent prices.  They also have the Parducci Sustainable Red and White- both for $5 per glass.  I find both to be quite drinkable, and for $5, a really good value.

Dinner was good but not memorable, so will probably use the synch offer for Happy Hour.

$25 off $50 is what I call a good value!

Update: The Twitter synch never showed up anywhere, so decided to try using multiple browsers.  I have 4 Amex cards, and I opened a separate Chrome window for each card, and selected the tab for "Amex Offers For You".  I was able to "Save Offer" on 3 cards ,but fat-fingered the third.  Still, $75 off $150 is a very good value!!

Cameron Hughes Lot 555 and one more

I had my wife pick up the 555 at Costco (she couldn't remember, but thought it was $25).  PnP (Popped and Poured- no decant).  I found the wine to be very typical of cabernet, but lacking in structure (no beginning, middle and end- just one consistent taste).  However, I did like and my wife liked and we finished the bottle quickly.  Would work great at a party, but not a case buy.

Since the 555 went so quickly, I wanted to open another cab to compare.  I had bought a case of the Hindsight Cabernet 2012 from a local retailer, so I opened one of those.  This is also a negociant bottling.  I PnP'd this one too, and it was not impressive.  I really need to decant this one next time because the only word that came to mind is "reticent".  I had tried it before I bought it, and I liked it but didn't take any notes.  Will decant a bottle later this week and report back.

This week, my big decision was how much Bedrock wine to buy.  If you haven't heard of Bedrock, you should.  Bedrock's wine maker is Morgan Twain-Peterson, son of Joel Peterson who was and is the winemaker at Ravenswood.  Here's Morgan's bio on his website.

I'm particularly fond of Syrah, and that is one of the great value grapes in California.  You'll find my focus on value throughout this blog.

Morgan makes a variety of field blends, which I really enjoy.  They are actually very similar to Chateauneuf-du-Pape because CdPs are also blends of many different grapes.  However, Morgan's blends have a different composition, with an emphasis on Zinfandel, as opposed to CdP's emphasis on Grenache, Syrah and Mourvedre.

The field blends are priced in the high $30s, and are still good values, but the great values are his base Syrah and Zinfandel, which sell to the mailing list for around $20, but are available at retail for around $25.  I highly recommend you try both the Syrah and the Zinfandel, and if you like them, go for one of his field blends or his single vineyard Zinfandels.

I know this sounds like an advertisement for Bedrock, but I'm a member of only around 5 wine mailing lists, and none of them are the high priced/well known wineries.  I don't buy Silver Oak, for example.