OKAY OKAY So I was actually just thinking about this topic the other day for one of my stories! (well not specifically about alcohol or drugs, so this is a bit of a tangent, and not specifically about elves, so this is a HUGE tangent, but shut up hear me out, I promise I'll circle back around eventually)
It all started when I was watching LOTR the other day and thinking about whether magical elvish tree cities would have handrails or not. (In LOTR they don't. (This bothers me.))
So we're talking about an ageless race/species that never naturally dies or decays (or in a scifi setting, one which has solved aging/disease/vanilla-type-deaths through medical technology, same difference), how would that affect the value they place on life and safety? Just because they don't age doesn't mean they can't die. No amount of agelessness or medical technology can prevent getting shot or stabbed or car-accidented or receiving a fatal dose of fall-off-ladder-hit-rock-break-neck, and if any of those happens they would be just as dead as anyone else.
Of course, they've had centuries to hone their spatial awareness, acrobatics, foresight, wisdom, and any other skill they like, so it makes sense that they could be just-slightly-superhuman (as indeed they are often portrayed), and less at danger of random accidents than most races. But no matter how diligent, wise, or acrobatic they are, accidents can still happen, which means that given enough time, something will get to them. Not only can they die, they will die. Every day they walk down the road to the grocery store they're gambling against eternity: trips and falls; drunk driver; muggings; random rabies chimpanzees. A human could rationalize such risk away easily, by saying he'll die within a century anyway, so the odds of buying it to a rabid chimpanzee on a grocery store walk are astronomically small and unworthy a second thought. But if an elf did nothing in life except stay at home and walk to the grocery store once a month, they're still guaranteed to buy it on one of those walks, by any of a number of tiny mistakes. They could double the number of millennia they live by preventing tripping by carrying a walking stick every time, double it again by taking backroads with fewer cars, double it yet again by avoiding people in general, and when the only thing on earth that could possibly harm them are random rabid chimpanzees, they could quadruple their life expectancy by getting their rabies shots.
Therefore, there is a fact hanging over the head of every elf that they're going to die someday, just as it is for humans. But the difference being that there's even less way to see it coming, there's an infinite life to gain by preventing it, and no matter what it is, they ALWAYS COULD HAVE DONE SOMETHING TO PREVENT IT.
So how does that affect the way they live their lives?
They could take on a sort of yolo attitude and go about their days as convenient for them. I would consider this especially likely if they have a belief in God and a spiritual sort of eternal life, which both relieves some of the responsibility for their fates, and changes the meaning of life away from perpetuating that life and more toward the results of that life in others (including creating new life, I guess? Whatever). At its most extreme, an apathy toward immortality would cause them to act like they don't have it at all, thus exactly resemble humans, which is boring. This is the same-handrails option.
Or they could embrace the personal-responsibility aspect of their fates, and emphasize personal care and ability. If a guy lives 4000 years then falls out of a tree and dies, then he'd wished he spent his younger years learning how to climb trees better. Same for a soldier who couldn't see an arrow coming , or the lost sailor at sea wishing he could navigate, or the guy on the way to the grocery store wishing he knew how to fight chimpanzees. With a theoretically infinite life to live and a theoretically infinite amount of time to learn everything that needs learning, they have no excuse for dying, even in dangerous situations. Thus it's sort of every-man-for-himself without any protection or safety. This is the fewer-handrails option, and I don't think the logic really holds up under scrutiny but whatever.
And finally the more-handrails option. Living longer means they have more to lose by dying. Friends they've had for centuries. Marriages for millenia. Possessions they can't become unaccustomed to. Habits so old they can never be broken. No need to seize the day or yolo or indulge in excess when they'll live forever, so they have their thrills safely, carefully, in wisdom and good measure. They would have handrails EVERYWHERE. This seems like the most logical and interesting option to me.
Humans are stuck in perpetual cultural conflict between old/conservative/permanent and new/liberal/changing philosophies because there's always new humans growing up with a new notion of how to do things, while those who have become old have become set in whatever way they grew up in. Elves (if their population is at all stable) would have very few children, and very little stimulus for changing their ways, and their culture and lifestyles would default toward stagnation and perpetuation.
An elf might regard a human in much the same way that humans regard bees. A bee doesn't live very long, and will never have a chance to do anything in that life except serve the good of the hive, so it's free to live dangerously, fly far and work hard, spend both its short life and its quick death in the service of that hive. To a human, it seems absurd and horrible that a bee dies half an hour after using its stinger. To an elf, it seems just as absurd and horrible that a human would risk life and limb on a ladder or a trampoline or a car. Totally unthinkable that they would ever go off to war. And equally unthinkable to fill your otherwise-immortal body with dangerous levels of feel-good-wake-up-with-headache-and-damaged-liver chemicals.
TL;DR: I think elvish wine would be pretty darn mild, and that the stereotype of them being snobby aristocrats with a sensitive, refined pallet is actually an entirely logical result of what they are.
And frankly, dwarves have a lot of body mass and a high tolerance for chemical imbalances (adapted as they are for breathing cave air and drinking ground water.) Their culture is built around cheer and comradery and one-up-manship, and their sciences are strikingly advanced on whatever narrow fields of study strike their interest. I challenge your claim that they would not be the ones to brew the kill-you-dead-where-you-stand juice.
