The paper provides a semantic analysis of expressive vocabulary that reflects the ideas of the Russian-language speakers about drinking alcohol. The material of the study are colloquial words and idioms expressing emotional / psychological attitude of the speakers to different referents of the alcohol consumption situation (that is: the process of drinking, the drinker himself, the alcoholic beverage, the state of intoxication, etc.). The authors study expressive units used by representatives of different social strata, including such units found in fiction, colloquial language, slang, vulgar speech. The theoretical and methodological framework of the study is based on the works of N. A. Lukyanova, T. V. Matveyeva, V. N. Teliya and other Russian linguists, where expressiveness is defined as a lexical category associated with the emotional-evaluative attitude of the speaker to the phenomena of reality and manifested in the connotative part of the lexical meaning of the expressive word. This study is the first to provide an analysis of the two semantic components of the ‘alcohol consumption’ vocabulary – intensity and emotional evaluation. It has been established that the intensity of the expressive vocabulary in question correlates with the deviation from the socially approved norm of drinking and the subsequent state of intoxication; this vocabulary manifests both negative and positive evaluation of the referents. The authors underline the influence of context on the emotional connotation of an expressive word and the consequent difficulty of interpreting expressive words (positively or negatively), describe the contextual means that make it possible to identify the emotional connotation of the used expressive. The authors come to a conclusion that a large number of expressive lexical units in narrations about drinking alcohol indicate their relevance to the speech behavior of native speakers of the Russian language. This confirms the expediency of further study of collective and individual perceptions of alcohol consumption present in the Russian-language linguistic worldview.