“Alcohol may be man's worst enemy, but the bible says love your enemy.”

Moldova sure seems agree with Frank Sinatra on this one....

Beer
Advertised on giant billboards downtown and available for purchase all over the place, beer is sort of like water here. But sometimes cheaper. You can buy it at stands in the park. It’s on tap at McDonald’s. I’ve generally been talked out of ordering it at bars and other alcohol-oriented situations – it’s mostly been something to drink with dinner (or in the van on road trips.)

Wine
As wine is one of Moldova’s largest industries, it’s a big deal here. People are very proud of Moldovan wine, and hopefully the industry will be able to recover from the hit it’s taken from Russia’s 2006 ban on Moldovan wine imports. (Wine exports to Russia made up 13% of Moldovan exports and 3% of its GDP, so this is not a minor problem. The country’s working on convincing Russia to lift the ban, and on finding alternate markets, but Moldovan wine’s sweetness apparently makes it hard to market most places. Also, many producers are hindered by inconsistent quality due to the fact they buy grapes in small quantities from various farmers rather than rigorously cultivating their own vineyards.) Though there is some excellent wine produced here, that doesn’t seem to be what people usually drink when just chilling at home with friends – then the wine of choice is homemade and poured out of reused soda/water bottles. I’m certainly no wine connoisseur, but I just can’t get into the stuff personally.

Vodka
This is what many of my Moldovan coworkers order at bars. People have been responsive to my idea to order orange juice to drink as a chaser, but they wouldn’t do it themselves – they seem to be more into straight vodka shots. And the tiny chain supermarket on my corner stocks dozens and dozens of different brands of vodka. (So many that I stopped counting because I felt weird intently scrutinizing the vodka section for so long.) I couldn’t find any good data on alcoholism in Moldova, but it’s often cited as a large (and growing) problem here. And last month, one of my American friends emailed me to say that he had read that Moldova has the third highest per capita consumption of pure alcohol in the world (after Luxembourg and Ireland) at 13 liters – and Oxford Journal on Alcohol places this figure at 25 liters per adult resident.

When it comes to drinking, Moldovans don’t mess around....