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Comment by aledalgrande | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if it's because of the wine belt or the warmer climate, but there is definitely a difference in drinking styles between Northern and Southern Europe.

While living in the Northern countries, I've seen an emphasis on the alcohol content and getting as drunk as you can, just for the goal of getting drunk. In Southern countries instead, there is more of an appreciation of what are you actually drinking, its taste and history. People still get very drink, but it's a more mellow experience, as they enjoy this dionysian rite.

Did anybody else have the same experience?

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Most people in Romania have a beer in the summer as a cold drink, not with the purpose of getting drunk, and wine or spirits in the winter as a social occasion for bonding, also not for getting wasted. There is no social habit here of getting wasted in the weekends and having a bad hangover on Monday morning, but most of my colleagues in Newcastle (UK) do that. Huge difference.

Yes, generally speaking, the northern countries have had very strict restrictions on alcohol, which somehow developed an unhealthy attitude in that, once your job is over on friday, get as drunk as fast as possible, preferably until sunday.

But it's changing - now there's an appreciation of the taste of good wines, craft beers and liquors during the week, although still going hardcore during the weekend.

I don't know if it's for the better, but it's changing.

You have it backwards, the drinking culture was even worse before the restrictions. They’d even pay workers in vodka rather than cash.

With craft beers it's usually still at the weekend and still mostly with the intention of getting the same level of drunk.

It just tastes better/different

I loved this when I moved to Italy the first time. I was pretty young, but not really interested in getting drunk, like many of my peers in the US.

Saw that you lived in Padova, that's where I studied :)

One, perhaps entirely pseudo scientific, theory is that the mediterranean peoples have been exposed to alcohol for several thousand years, and have had developed a genetic tolerance that the northern Europeans do not yet have.

Compare to the Chinese, who have had alcohol for up to 8000 years, and have developed the anti alcohol "asian flush" gene.

This is not actually crazy. The prevalence of alcoholism is inversely related to how long most of your ancestors have been farming. And within Europe, the northerners have much more descent from the Indo-European invaders, compared to Mediterranean people -- this used to be a guess but we now have solid genetics. And we have known for much longer (from reconstructing their language) that the invaders had cows but not agriculture, before spreading out.

Yes but also, northern countries don't grow wine, and if they do it's very small quantities and generally not a great wine.

It's a rarity to find English, Polish or Danish wine, they exist but are overpriced for what you're getting.

Both beer and spirits are made from grains, which are much easier to grow there as well as easy to import. Thus vodka, whisky, beer.

Although many would disagree, there's way less to appreciate in beer and vodka than it is in wine. Beer doesn't even have distinct recognised regions and for vodka you can't even tell whether it's made from grain, rye or potatoes, unless it's a really bad poorly filtered one.

On the contrary the appreciation culture for whisky is alive and well. In central Europe, lots of home-made spirits from local fruits are made and people like to taste and compare also.

> Although many would disagree, there's way less to appreciate in beer and vodka than it is in wine. Beer doesn't even have distinct recognised regions

I know that this is an extremely subjective point of opinion, but haven't you met anyone who insists that all wine comes in two flavours, red and white? Do you really think it's fair to group beer with vodka?

The map deals with beer, vodka and wine. I'm not grouping vodka and beer, I'm setting wine apart.

You explicitly group vodka and beer when you say:

> there's way less to appreciate in beer and vodka than it is in wine

I strongly expect that if you tested drinkers' ability to distinguish different types of beers vs. vodka vs. wine, it would become clear that the above statement is patently false.

> Beer doesn't even have distinct recognised regions

Does this matter as much for beer as it does for wine? Given that, as far as I understand brewing, most of the flavour comes from the hops used, with some also from the type of yeast and cereal. These can all be transported to some degree before they're brewed together, so a beer's provenance doesn't matter so much as its style and particular ingredients.

The grain can influence flavor a lot, but that's more from how the grain was processed than where it was grown. I don't think I could tell American 2-row pale malt from British 2-row pale malt or Belgian pilsner malt, but they'll both be pretty different from Vienna malt, which is kilned darker. Small additions of "specialty" malts like roasted barley or various caramelized malts can also shift flavor quite a bit.

I experienced the opposite. But then again, I was living in the north, but onpy visited the south occasioanlly, where there were more tourists about.

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