It's not clear what was the method to measure this. The article mentions "preferred alcohol," "drinking," "drinking pattern" and "production." This can be misl

It's not clear what was the method to measure this. The article mentions "preferred alcohol," "drinking," "drinking pattern" and "production." This can be misleading as many comments state below. For example, Romania is a big wine producer, it's most known for wine, but a lot of that wine goes for export. For drinking, a one liter of vodka equals four liters of wine in terms of alcohol content. So a country that drinks 1.5x more wine in quantity over vodka isn't necessarily getting drunk on wine, because you may order a couple glasses of 2dl wine but hit 6 vodka shots of 0.5dl each so basically your main drink of the night was spirit even though quantity-wise you consumed more wine. Often times, in central eastern Europe, you order beer which is half a liter but you get several shots with it. For preferred alcohol, it's kind of like when you ask people if they prefer theatre to cinema, most will answer theatre even though they'll only go to cinema. Or ask them if they prefer to read Economist or Buzzfeed. Nobody ever answers Buzzfeed, yet it is one of the most read media in the world. So ask me if I prefer beer or wine, I'll say wine because I do. But when I go out I'll have a beer because it's cheaper allows me to sit in the pub much longer without getting drunk too fast and everyone else drinks it too. This is hard to measure. But overall for main countries like Spain, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Russia etc. it's seems to be correct. The correct way to measure this, in my opinion would be to measure which beverage delivers the most alcohol content for the said population for that will be its preferred alcoholic beverage.