Just about anything in moderation can be good for you. An excess of anything can be bad. Moderation levels can be very low or very high.
Water is good for you; more water is better for you. Until you have had too much water (and ignored the rest of your diet) and you get hyponatremia.
My take on alcohol is that wine and beer can have some positive health benefits as long as you limit how much you drink. I brew my own beer, so I know exactly what is in it, and I tend to drink 1 or 1 1/2 beers a few times a week. I enjoy the taste, and I like to drink it, but I do not like being drunk. I almost never drink rice beers such as Budweiser (or other American macro-brewed pilsners) anymore. The health benefits of wine are even greater than that for an occasional beer, but it costs more and my wife and I do not drink it often enough to finish a bottle in a timely manner very often. As such, we usually only open a bottle when we have guests over or we are cooking with it (which boils off the alcohol itself, by the way).
I did a 35 day test w/o beer or wine before I ran the New York City Marathon a couple months ago, and all in all I do not think that it made a very big difference in my lifestyle one way or the other. I did not sleep as well, but I do not think that that had anything to do with the lack of booze and was probably unrelated. (My wife was sick much of that time and did a lot of tossing and turning.)
I almost never drink any hard alcohol anymore. I enjoy the taste of whiskey, but I tend to get to the buzzed state way too quickly and I do not like to buzzed so I usually just pass on it for the past 3 or 4 years.
In general, I think that drinking beer or wine is better for you than drinking an equivalent amount of coffee or soda. Caffeine is a far worse drug than alcohol (or tobacco) but it is not a controlled substance so people usually ignore that. It is much more addictive. I completely eliminated caffeine from my diet when I went blind for 2 weeks once and I found out that it was one of the catalysts for my cluster migraines I had been having my whole life.
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