The Evil John Barleycorn

Coming from California, where supermarkets can and do sell liquor 24/7 -- and where your supersaver card will often save you a large chunk of the purchase price -- you can´t help but be struck by all the restrictions the government here puts on alcohol. In a licensed pub or restaurant, a glass of beer will set you back at least 50 kroner (over $8). That same beer bought in a supermarket will run you approximately 25 kroner (about $4). Each beer is sold individually, and there is no discount or incentive to buying in bulk (say a 6, 12, or 24-pack). If you´re in a supermarket and see a beer priced reasonably, check the label. It´s one of the non-alcoholic brands Clausthaler or Munkholm. Nonalcoholic beer sells here because they recently lowered the drunk-driving limit from 0.02% blood alcohol (1/4 of the usual American limit) to zero. That´s right. No alcohol whatsoever that same day before driving, and a first drunk driving arrest means you automatically lose your license for a year and spend 21 days in jail.
If you´re still in the market for beer and find a price that only seems a bit egregious, it´s what they call Lettøl, literally "light beer," but really what Midwesterners with leftover Prohibition laws used to call "near beer," i.e. 2%. Supermarkets will not sell any beer after 6 o´clock, and anything 5% or stronger -- which includes a number of beers like German Doppelbock -- has to be sold at branches of the state-run liquor store, Vinmonopolet. "Polet," as the natives call it, graciously offers you the chance to select from whatever wines and liquors its bureaucrats have selected for your consumption. My first experience with Polet was on my second visit here. I was a student and not exactly flush, so I spent $15 or so on a bottle of the finest Hungarian wine. If that sounds like an oxymoron, you´re right. Inki and I each took a taste and poured the rest down the sink, where it presumably did wonders on any hair clogs it met on its way down.
The pricing system at Polet is based on alcohol content, not quality, so it turns conventional liquor store wisdom on its head. In the US, for instance, you could either buy Bozo McDooDad´s Whisk-EE! for $8 a liter or 12-year-old single malt Macallan scotch for $40, or you could go with something in between that represented a compromise between the state of your finances and your (un)willingness to drink paint thinner. At Polet there´s no point in economizing. There a liter of Bozo´s best will run you around 370 kroner ($60), whereas the Macallan will set you back around 400 kroner ($66), which offers you the chance to retain your liver function for a paltry $6 premium. The same goes for wine; it´s best to buy the most expensive bottle you can. Anything reasonably potable starts at around $20 a bottle, but if you splurge a little and buy carefully you can get some very good and highly sought-after wines for prices that would almost be competitive in an open market elsewhere in the world.
A lifetime of shopping at Polet means Norwegians know the value of duty-free shopping. I never used to pay duty-free any attention at the airport since the prices were comparable to what I saw every day in the store, if not higher. I had my first glimpse of the Scandinavian mania for duty-free when I first came in 1996. I was on a boat from Germany to Denmark wandering aimlessly until I was swept into the duty-free store by a human wave of Danes clamoring to buy every ounce of liquor on sale on the ferry while it was still in international waters. Mind you, these were Danes. By Norwegian standards, Denmark is a cheap place to drink.
So why all this government intervention, you ask, particularly since Norwegians consume on average substantially less alcohol per capita than the average European and far less than in France or the UK? Whereas the average Frenchman consumes around 14 liters of wine a year, the average Norwegian consumes about half that. The problem is while the Frenchman consumes his 14 liters over the course of 365 days, a number of Norwegians polish off several of their 7 or 8 liters off in the course of a single wild weekend bender. Binge drinking, particularly on the weekends, is a major social issue in all the Nordic countries, along with the disturbances of the peace that go hand in hand with it. State distribution and high taxes are seen by the government as a way to keep the population from heading to the shores with longboats on Friday night and waking up on Monday morning to find themselves in the north of England having raided and burned half the fishing villages and monasteries along the coast. If they run out of drinking money before they get across the North Sea, the government hopes it won´t find itself in the unenviable position of figuring out how make a strategic withdrawal from Manchester or Liverpool.
These restrictions are not without problems. First and foremost, they don´t seem to work since there´s still a lot of binge drinking on the weekends which is taken by residents as a matter of course. An example: at the movies this week they showed a short film mixed in with the trailers in which a local man drank himself silly and went out on the town with his buddies, taking a moment to relieve himself in the town square. Two police officers came over, asked what he might be doing and ticketed him with a fine of several thousand kroner (hundreds of dollars). The cheery tagline: "Hold on to your money. Greetings from your local police." There is also a thriving black market in liquor smuggled in from abroad and it happens every so often that a handful of Norwegians are blinded or killed by drinking smuggled liquor cut with methanol (wood alcohol). Some Norwegians and social scientists argue that restrictions on drinking increase the associated social problems, pointing to countries like Holland which reduced a lot of the violence that was occurring on the weekends at closing time by getting rid of arbitrary closing times and letting licensed vendors serve alcohol when they wanted. Our American experience with Prohibition also has its lessons to teach. For now, however, these appeals fall on deaf ears, while Inki, Andor, and I keep bottling some pretty good homemade wine with all the berries and fruit available here.