After a cracking June, hopes are high for a great Irish summer, so right on cue, we’ve some hot summer offers to keep you and your wallet as cool as a breeze.

Never mind spending piles of cash swanning off to France this summer - we’re bringing France direct to your doorstep with fabulous savings on all our French wines for July and August!

Fancy lounging in the garden with a relaxing Rosé, or sipping a chilled white by the seaside? Every bottle, every colour, every vintage is 10% off all summer long!

And it’s not just France that we’ve targeted for special prices on whites. We’ve these recommendations for summer sipping, all with cool discounts to make a stock-up a little easier.

Having trouble picking your own mixed case? Well, things just got a little easier.

We’re building a name as Ireland’s mixed case wine specialists, with permanent discounts on a range of pre-mixed cases from only €100, and with free delivery anywhere in Ireland. We’ve the established Curious favourites, with re-vamped Old World, New World, all Red and all White mixes, or check-out the newly launched Simply range, our recommendations on where to start if Australia, Chile, France or Italy is your thing.

Finally, we always keep the odd little offer, such as bin-end or limited availability wines, for our Newsletter subscribers. If you’re not signed up, you’ve nothing to lose but everything to gain by doing so - click here to find out more and to sign-up in one easy step.

As we designed the July contest the sun WAS shining but, ever the optimists, we’re heralding the start of the magnificent Irish summer with a barbeque-themed prize for our July contest. This month we’re giving away six really smart, patio-friendly wine glasses (ok, they’re plastic but ‘wine plastics’ just doesn’t sound right), a picnic-friendly disposable barbeque, and the obligatory couple of bottles of palate-friendly summer rosé while you wait for the sausages to cook.

How to enter: As ever, all you have to do to enter is join (or already be a member of) our monthly newsletter. We’ll draw a winner at random on the 1st July when our next newsletter goes out, and deliver your Barbeque pack the day after (or whenever you’d like) free of charge. You are of course completely welcome to un-join the minute after the draw is done, but we like giving discounts and free stuff to our members, so we hope you’ll stick around!

Congratulations to the winner of the June contest, Genevieve Wiseman from Cork, who is now adopting Curious the baby giraffe and toasting his arrival with a few bottles of South African Long Neck!

Following on from Mike’s Ode to Sauvignon Blanc, we’re giving the winner of this contest a delicious Taste the Difference experience. One lucky wine lover will receive three Sauvignons from France, Chile and New Zealand to tickle the taste buds and experience the quality and diversity this great grape has to offer.

The lucky winner will also receive our exclusive Essential Wine Tasting Guide along with six ISO tasting glasses and an official Curious Wines corkscrew, so you and a lucky accomplice can taste like pros. (Or use the guide as a coaster and just drink the wine like a prole - that works, too.)

The wines up for tasting are:

• Domaine du Pre Baron Touraine from the Loire in France
• Santa Alicia Reserva Sauvignon Blanc from the Maipo Valley in Chile
• Tussock Sauvignon Blanc from Nelson in New Zealand

How to Enter: All you have to do to enter the contest is join (or already be a member of) our monthly newsletter. We’ll draw a winner at random on the 12th May when our next newsletter goes out, and deliver your Sauvi Taste the Difference Experience the day after (or whenever you’d like) free of charge. You are of course completely welcome to un-join the minute after the draw is done, but we only send one newsletter per month and we like giving discounts and free stuff to our members, so we hope you’ll stick around!

PS: Congrats to the winner of the April contest, Katherine Nolan, who was drawn this morning!

This month we’re doing something a little different and issuing a challenge to the winner of our next monthly draw: beat our recession busting favourites in a supermarket challenge.

Lar Veale of SourGrapes.ie recently declared our exclusive Santa Alicia to be “cracking value at only €9.99 and beats the pants off anything from your local supermarket.” We think this is 100% correct, but we’d like you to put our best bargains to the test.

The winner of our April contest will get two of our favourite wines under a tenner and everything they need to go forth and find two supermarket wines under €10 to challenge them:

• 1 x Santa Alicia Reserva Sauvignon Blanc 2007
• 1 x Farnese Montepulciano d’Abruzzo 2007
• 1 x €20 Tesco voucher
• 1 x Essential Wine Tasting Guide to prepare
• 1 x Curious Wines corkscrew to begin the battle

Obviously, we can’t force our valiant winner to spend their voucher on supermarket plonk, but our hope is that our brave hero (or heroine) will make their best effort in the Tesco aisle, choose two bottles under €10 each, and report back on how they stand up to our favourites.

How to Enter: All you have to do to enter the contest is join (or already be a member of) our monthly newsletter. We’ll draw a winner at random on the 8th of April when our next newsletter goes out, and deliver your Battle of the Recession Busters prize pack the day after (or whenever you’d like) free of charge. You are of course completely welcome to un-join the minute after the draw is done, but we only send one newsletter per month and we like giving discounts and free stuff to our members, so we hope you’ll stick around!

PS: Congrats to the winner of February’s contest, Terence Finn, who was drawn this morning!

We know, we know - everyone else is doing Paddy’s Day stuff for March but let’s face it: Ireland isn’t exactly a top producer of 1st class wines, and few wines come in that particularly festive shade of green.

But the 13th of March is also the Ides of March - a traditional Roman feast day and, on a less jolly note, the day on which Julius Caesar was assassinated. (We’re assuming you’re up to date on your Shakespeare here.)

So we’re going with the Italy theme and giving away two glorious bottles of Italian wine and a prize hamper worthy of a Roman orgy. The lucky winner of our Ides of March prize pack will win:

• 1 x Dievolino Rosso Sangiovese 2006
• 1 x Dievolino Bianco Malvasia 2006
• 1 x An Italian epicure mini-hamper
• 1 x Julius Caesar: The Manga Edition

How to Enter: All you have to do to enter the contest is join (or already be a member of) our monthly newsletter. We’ll draw a winner at random on the 4th of March when our next newsletter goes out, and deliver your Ides of March prize pack the day after (or whenever you’d like) free of charge. You are of course completely welcome to un-join the minute after the draw is done, but we only send one newsletter per month and we like giving discounts and free stuff to our members, so we hope you’ll stick around!

PS: Congrats to the winner of February’s contest, Rebecca Clark, who was drawn this morning!