Saudi Arabia’s only official liquor outlet has run out of supplies, from beers to wines to tequilas, as disruptions to supply chains caused by the war in Iran delay shipments.
The liquor store, located in Riyadh’s diplomatic quarter, which has no name and no signage, opened in 2024 to serve non-Muslim diplomats and last year expanded by selling to wealthy non-Muslim foreign residents.
Officially, in Saudi Arabia, a blanket ban on alcohol from 1952 remains in place, but the ultra-conservative Sunni kingdom has licensed one liquor store as it tries to attract more foreigners.
At the moment, however, the shelves in the liquor store are mostly empty and the only ones available are expensive or lesser-known brands, five people who visited the store in Riyadh in recent days pointed out.
One Western diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said there was no white wine and “only a few bottles of very expensive red.”
“They also received a shipment of a random beer,” the diplomat added.
The shortages have led to long queues outside the Riyadh store and foreign residents of the Saudi capital are leaving work in the middle of the day to try their luck, with nerves sometimes frayed and fights breaking out, visitors to the store told Reuters.
The prospective buyers said store staff told them that shipments from Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, which have more relaxed alcohol rules than Saudi Arabia, had been delayed.
The liquor store in Riyadh, however discreet and tightly controlled, is a landmark in efforts by the de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto leader, to open Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam, to the world.
Before the store opened, those who wanted to consume alcohol in Saudi Arabia resorted to home-brewed beer, tried to find it through diplomatic channels or on the black market, where costs and quality varied.
Reuters reported last year that Saudi Arabia was planning to open two more liquor stores – one in Jeddah and another to serve foreigners at Saudi Arabia’s state oil company Aramco in the east of the country – but three sources said that had not yet happened.
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