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Cheap(ish) Booze for Christmas?

The spirit of Christmas. Image from www.sxc.hu.

The spirit of Christmas. Image from www.sxc.hu.

Like many people, I’ll be looking to buy a few bottles of sweet, sweet booze for Christmas.  I only need to pick up a few for gifts and for the house, and don’t have a large enough order to warrant a trip to the North.  While doing some shopping in Dublin city yesterday I was hoping to pick up some bottles and get a few decent deals. Surely the supermarkets here must be offering good deals on booze, I thought to myself, in order to tempt people not to cross the border?

Tesco in the Jervis Centre had flashy signs on many of the name brand bottles, offering €2 off here, €3 off there.  Not too bad, but the shelves were pretty depleted and even in that large store, they didn’t have the brand I was looking for. My next stop was Dunnes on George’s St, which had precisely zero offers on its tiny selection of whiskeys and other bottles.  It is quite a small shop, to be fair, and I haven’t written them off completely yet.  But on their website, they only list wine offers, so it’s not looking too promising.  Has anyone seen any good deals on strong booze for Christmas?

Even the helpful Boards.ie Bargains Thread doesn’t have anything (although there seem to be plenty of beer offers out there if you’re interested).  Is this an insurmountable problem due to alcohol duty in Ireland?  Any retailers out there feel like giving us the inside scoop on the profit margin on a bottle of whiskey?  I’m not a brand name fiend by any means, but giving a bottle of off-brand mystery gin from Aldi or Lidl isn’t really an option for a Christmas present.  Gotta keep it classy, y’all.

19 Comments

  1. Super Valu are keeping me nicely topped up this Christmas. They have deals on whiskey and brandy at the moment and their wine selection is great too, fleurie for €9.99 is not too shabby.

  2. Dunnes did have deals on Whiskey a while back. I got a couple of bottles of Jameson for 16euro each!! Not bad. There was loads of other on sale to!

  3. Super Valu do indeed have good deals – bottles of Jameson €10 off, that kind of thing. Even their shop on Aston Quay, which has a small liquor section, had lots of offers on. Best I’ve seen so far.

  4. O’Brien’s have the following offers, plus 10% back on your loyalty card (which you can pick up instore and register later):
    Paddy/Jameson/Smirnoff: 20
    Absolut/Bacardi/Cork Dry Gin: 18

    I think Supervalu are the cheapest alright, but O’Brien’s might beat some of them when you factor in the 10%.

  5. Dunnes are doing bopttle of Smirnoff and Barcardi amongst others for €16.99 each.

  6. You must be looking in the drapery section in dunnes or something! There’s offers on booze at all the supermarkets, I’m sure if you pick up your local free newspaper you’ll see plenty of ads that provide evidence. I got a bottle of powers for 17-18e and bushmills for about same in dunnes a couple of weeks ago. 12 year old redbreast is 35 quid in O’briens, 40 in dunnes, normally 45. 12 year old jameson and powers for 30 as well in dunnes, got a bottle of the later. Honestly you are either looking for something very very obscure or complaining for the sake of it, because the offers are very clearly out there.

  7. ps, leave the bargain alerts forum for this one and go to the beer, wine and spirits section of boards. If you want specific information on these things it would make sense to look in those forums, which include a thread about whiskey that has over sixty replies, amongst other things.

  8. Dunnes do actually have some offers on their website – just not in the ‘wine, beer, spirits section’ where you might expect them (instead they’re here: http://www.dunnesstores.ie/page.php?pid=397; can’t make out the ‘valid until’ date though, could be today). Those listed include Absolut and Powers for 16.99 but when I picked up a bottle of Jameson for that price on Wednesday there were lots of other good discounts there that aren’t included in the ad.

  9. I recently acquired a bottle of Aldi specially selected single malt whiskey in a hamper. most single malts are good irrespective of where they came from. But this has to be one of the worst bottles of whiskeys I’ve ever tasted.

  10. Brian, your comments are kind of rude. Of course I wasn’t looking in the drapery section – I went into Dunnes on Georges St and looked at their liquor section, and there were no offers of any kind being advertised. I wasn’t looking for anything obscure and I have no interest in complaining for the sake of it. If you look at the other comments here you’ll see that I added that Super Valu are running good offers. This post was intended to ask for feedback and gather information, at no point did I say I’d combed every supermarket in the city, so your snide tone is uncalled for.

  11. Why of why dont Dunnes get off their bums and carpet bomb us with PR and ads and the like. Its hard to support them when they’re very cagey about their offers and new products.

  12. Jean, I found it slightly ridiculous that a blogger dedicated to grocery deals couldn’t find deals on alcohol at the time of year when they are most in abundance in a year when there have been more deals than ever.

    It has nothing to do with whether you’ve combed the supermarkets or not-this website posts links to all the major supermarkets weekly deals, that alone should have been enough to find what’s on offer.

    There was no snide tone, I even told you what section of boards to look at since you were clearly having trouble there too, but fair enough, easier to get insulted than to follow up the information I gave you.

  13. Brian, I made it clear in my post that I’d just started looking and was asking for feedback, and was open about the fact that I’d only checked two supermarkets. Dunnes didn’t have their offers listed on their website, and Tesco and Superquinn only had a few, nothing special. Your tone was snide, and continues to be so – “clearly having trouble there” – that’s quite a snotty way to address people. I’m not insulted at all, just mildly irritated at the rudeness.

  14. There was nothing ‘snotty’ about my post, you were having trouble finding the relevant threads on alcohol offers- is that not a fact you posted in your blog?

  15. There’s nothing ridiculous about it, slightly or otherwise. We often put up open threads here on CheapEats looking for information: where can we find preserved lemons, where’s nice for a short break, where can we find cheapish booze. As the CheapEats writers run this blog on a part-time basis, we don’t always have the resources to do as much research as we’d like for every single post. So, especially in our Queries category,our readers become a resource and share information with one another. Sometimes we’ll put up a posts that lists one or two offers or pieces of info and ask readers to share more; sometimes we don’t have a few hours to research the deals (what with having full time jobs and providing this website for free) and so we throw the questions out there. Either way, we hope that these posts offer something useful – and still free – for our readers.

  16. “Either way, we hope that these posts offer something useful – and still free – for our readers” They do, Peter. Thanks a lot for all your hard work. I found great tips and special offers here

  17. Seconded – I enjoy the site (and therefore your work). Happy Christmas!

  18. Thirded (if there is such a thing!)