That's not wine . . . it's an ostentatious status symbol

At some point, an expensive bottle of wine stops being just wine and starts being primarily a status symbol. Case in point:

Staff were delighted at the sale and the three customers were eager to taste the £18,000 magnum of Pétrus 1961 — one of the greatest vintages of one of the greatest wines in the world — which they had reserved from the cellars several weeks before.

Unfortunately, the guests at Zafferano in Knightsbridge proved to be a little too discerning.

As the magnum was uncorked, they declared it to be a fake, refused to touch the bottle and sent it back.

I enjoy wine, and I'm usually able to appreciate the extra quality that goes with a higher price tag . . . up to a limit. The most expensive wine I've tasted was a $400 Chateau Margaux, which was excellent, but (to my taste anyway) not as good as a $95 bottle I sampled on the same evening (a Gevry-Chambertin). Wine is certainly subjective, so my experiences can't be easily generalized, but I think it would be safe to say that the vast majority of wine drinkers would find that their actual appreciation of the wine tapers off beyond a certain price point.

If you normally drink $15-20 bottles of wine, you'll certainly find that the $30-40 range will taste better and have more depth and complexity of flavour. Jumping up to the $150-200 range will probably have the same relative effect, but you've gone to 10 times the price for perhaps 2-4 times the perceived quality. Perhaps I'm wrong, and the $1,000+ wines have transcendental qualities that peasants like me can't even imagine, but I strongly doubt it. Any wine over $500 has passed the "quality" level and is from that point onwards really a "prestige" thing.

Update: A commenter at Fark.com offered this link as counter-evidence:

"Contrary to the basic assumptions of economics, several studies have provided behavioral evidence that marketing actions can successfully affect experienced pleasantness by manipulating nonintrinsic attributes of goods. For example, knowledge of a beer's ingredients and brand can affect reported taste quality, and the reported enjoyment of a film is influenced by expectations about its quality," the researchers said. "Even more intriguingly, changing the price at which an energy drink is purchased can influence the ability to solve puzzles."

This is why wines are generally tasted blind for comparative purposes (that is, with no indication of the wine's identity provided). It's a well-known phenomena that people expect to enjoy more expensive things than cheaper equivalents.

You can try this one for yourself: next time you're pouring a beer or a wine for a guest, hide the container and tell them that what you're pouring is much more rare/expensive/unusual than what it really is. Most people, either from politeness (they don't want to be rude) or fear of being thought ignorant (that they can't actually perceive this wonderful quality) or genuine belief in what you've said, will go along with the host's deception and praise the drink as being so much better than whatever they normally drink.

Human beings are wonderful at rationalizing . . . and self-deception.