Alcohol for weddings

prodigy1

Hi, does anybody know if its worth our while going up the north of Ireland or overseas to buy drink for our wedding.(wine, champagne etc)
any info would be great.

Thanks
Pat

How Strange

It depends on how much you're planning to buy. Definitely consider going up north but going abroad to say France can be prohibitively expensive.

Also shop around down here (in the Republic) because we got great French wine in Superquinn for just under €7 a bottle which was 50% off. We also got our sparkling wine in M&S.

Shop around is the best advice I can give you.

thebiglad

Depends on number of guests and therefore the amount of wine/champagne needed.

Don't forget to factor in the hotels corkage fee per bottle and if you do supply your own wine/champagne make sure that the hotel will chill it and that you get it to the hotel in good time to be chilled (i.e. not on the morning of the wedding).

You will have to overstock on the wine to make sure you do not run out (whereas with a hotel supplied wine (subject to cost) you only pay for that which is used just make sure that they use up all half bottles etc before opening new bottles - job for the best man;)).

Any ununsed bottles will have to be removed from the hotel after the wedding.

On top of that you have the fuel costs (unless you are going north anyhow).

Overall there is little doubt you will save but compare that to the increased hassle and we come back to the opening point - for a lot of alcohol its worth it but for a smaller wedding you have enough to organise already

For our wedding we used a wine merchant (not as expensive as it sounds) they delivered the wine and agreed to collect/refund all the unused bottles.

prodigy1

thanks alot 4 the info..we are looking for about a 100 bottles of wine pluss 10 crates of beer plus around 40 bottles or so of champagne/sparkling wine.

any ideas with this volume in mind:eek:

How Strange

prodigy1 wrote: »

thanks alot 4 the info..we are looking for about a 100 bottles of wine pluss 10 crates of beer plus around 40 bottles or so of champagne/sparkling wine.

any ideas with this volume in mind:eek:

We'll have approx 100 people at ours so we bought 60 bottles of wine (50/50 split between red and white) and 48 bottles of cava. We got the wine from superquinn and the cava from m&s. The whole lot cost €720 which was fantastic value. My initial ballpark for wine was €7-8 per bottle, €10 for sparkling.

Bennetts (google them for the website) up north do a delivery service to ROI but their cheaper wines tend to be Chilean or South African which I'm not crazy about. Fine Wines (again google for website) is an Irish off licence which sells in bulk and gives discounts so check them out. Also go into the wine shops and have a chat with them. Any business person with half a brain will be open to negotiation and offering good discounts. The Sunday Times have a wine club but for the quantities we were looking at it wasn't working out any cheaper because legally they have to charge a duty on wine shipped to ROI. However, they gave us great advice and were offering great discounts. Keep an eye on m&s as they do great deals every now and then. There is a wine and beer forum on here too as well as a bargains forum both of which are great for advice and seeing what supermarkets has deals at the moment.

As I said before shop around because then you'll know a bargain when you see it. We saw Chilean wine for €5 just before Christmas but when we bought a bottle to taste it was foul so don't get sucked in just by the price. Always buy a bottle and test it yourself.

As for beer, we agreed with our venue that we wouldn't bring in any beer as they have a bar with two bar staff so anyone who wants beer as an apero or for their dinner can buy it at the bar.