[Namari]

It also depends of the region you live in. In Brittany for example people drunk a lot of watery wine and sweet cider but they drunk it in quantity for some of them. You canread in Jean-Marie Deguinet's "Mémoires d'un paysan bas breton" (19th centuary) that people were drinking a lot of cider and particulary his wife who was a cider Alcoholic.

The gnole as you speak is more something that became popular amongst the Poilu during the first world war and after, I'm not sure if there was loads of people drinking it in the past but it feels like the spirits became more popular by the end of the 20th centuary.

[prmoustache]

My grandfather had a cider brewery and even the apple juice he made had a bit of alcohol from fruit fermentation. Something below 1% though so we drank it as kids.

I would say in the case of cider you have to drink an awful lot to feel intoxicated, you definitely suffer from diarrea before you feel the alcohol.