At Aldi today I bought a bottle of very cheap Irish Cream. (I hadn’t heard of it before, was intrigued by the low price, figuring either it would be a disaster, which would be entertaining, or else decent, which would mean I’d found a nice bargain.)
The brand is “O’Donnells”. It wasn’t offensive tasting or anything, so that was nice.
Then, reading the label, I discovered that it’s wine based, which I’d never heard of. So I went looking for more information online.
The only page I can find referring to the product is [here*. That’s a page just sort of listing the product and a price, though apparently not for sales purposes. Googling “O’donnells Irish Cream” yields only that result. (And a bunch of irrelevant ones of course.)
At the bottom of that page, it mentions Prestige Wine Group as the marketer of the product. But at their website, I can find [url=http://www.prestigewinegroup.com/home/default.aspx]no mentione](http://www.tastings.com/scout_spirits.lasso?id=179724) of O’Donnells. I do find mention of O’Reilly’s, which I see is a different wine based Irish Cream. But no mention of O’Donnells, not on Prestige Wine Group’s website, and not anywhere else on the Internet that I’ve been able to discover.
So basically, what I’m asking is, what is this stuff? Where did it come from? Why is it not mentioned online almost anywhere?
Addendum and Correction: I don’t know what happened last time I googled it. Maybe there was a typo or something. A second googling yields http://odonnellsirishcream.com, a page advertising the product. No real further information there, but at least there’s not this confusing phenomenon I thought I was seeing before where there was this product being marketed that had no internet presence at all. It felt like the world was coming apart or something.
ETA: And I notice that the blurb for O’Donnells at its website is substantially similar in wording to the blurb for O’Reilly’s at the Prestige Wine Group website. Are they maybe the same product being sold in different locations or something? Or did Prestige Wine Group probably just decide there was no need to write a new blurb when they had one already ready for recycling, maybe?
And why doesn’t Prestige Wine Group’s website mention O’Donnells?
Pretty much everything Aldi sells is private brand made exclusively for their store, so I’m surprised you found anything about this particular product.
The reason for it being wine-based is so that it can be sold in a wider variety of store locations than if it were liquor-based. In many states, wine can be sold in grocery stores but liquor can’t.
Interesting. Over here (in North America), I’d sayBailey’s is the most popular brand. It’s the only brand I’ve seen advertised in any case. I prefer Bushmill’s personally. I never imagined it could be made with wine, but I can understand a company doing so to obey the rules Claire Beauchamp mentions.
The supermarkets here (UK) sell their own cheap Irish Cream knock-offs, usually made with wine instead of Irish whiskey. Not for licensing reasons, but because it’s a cheaper ingredient, I guess.
The website says ‘wine spirits’. I take that to mean ‘brandy’. Here in Washington, brandy, though it is grape/wine-based, is sold in liquor stores and not grocery stores. It’s a PITA when I want to make steak au poivre.
Last week I accidentally found a bottle of O’Mara’s Irish cream, which is wine-based. (I say ‘accidentally’, as I needed gas and stopped in at a station that was also a [del]liquor[/del] beer & wine store.) I’ve just had some, and it tastes remarkably like the real stuff. Not quite as good, but not bad at all.
