Several parts combine into one character.

酒 is a compound ideograph of richer-than-usual etymology: 氵 (water) + 酉 (yǒu, in modern usage "rooster" / 10th of the 12 zodiac animals, but originally a pictograph of a pottery wine-jar with a narrow neck). 酉 itself was the ancient character for "wine vessel" — and it appears as a radical anchoring the entire vocabulary of fermented drink and intoxication: 醉 (drunk), 醒 (sober), 配 (pair / mix — originally "matching wine cups"), 醸 (brew). Adding 氵 (water) to 酉 (wine jar) gave 酒 — the liquid of wine. The character documents the entire technology of fermentation in two components.

Korean reading "ju." 飮酒 (eumju, drinking alcohol — 음주운전 eumju-unjeon "drunk driving"), 酒店 (jujeom, drinking establishment / pub), 淸酒 (cheongju, refined / clear sake — Korean traditional rice wine, also referring to Japanese sake), 濁酒 (takju, "cloudy sake" = makgeolli, Korean traditional fermented rice wine). Korean drinking culture has elaborated 주 vocabulary across many wine types.

Mandarin jiǔ, 3rd tone. 酒 (jiǔ), 啤酒 (píjiǔ, "beer-wine" — using a phonetic 啤 borrowed from "beer"), 白酒 (báijiǔ, "white wine" but actually meaning Chinese clear distilled spirits like Maotai and Erguotou — 56% alcohol or higher; NOT Western white wine), 红酒 (hóngjiǔ, "red wine" = Western-style red wine, increasingly popular since the 1990s), 酒店 (jiǔdiàn, "wine-shop" → semantic shift to mean "hotel" — historically Chinese inns served drinks, and the building name extended; modern 酒店 in Mandarin means luxury hotel, NOT pub).

Japanese on-reading シュ (shu) — 飲酒 (inshu, drinking alcohol), 清酒 (seishu, sake), 日本酒 (Nihonshu, "Japanese sake" — formal name for traditional Japanese rice wine). Kun-reading さけ (sake) — 酒 (sake, alcohol / sake — though as a global loanword "sake" came to mean specifically Japanese rice wine in English, in Japanese it means any alcoholic drink), お酒 (osake, polite "alcohol"), 酒場 (sakaba, drinking place / bar). Japan's drinking culture is dense with 酒 vocabulary: 居酒屋 izakaya (drinking-staying-shop = pub), 酒蔵 sakagura (sake brewery).

Memory aid: water (氵) plus a wine jar (酉) — the liquid in the jar = wine.