An Hermès bag is a tiny slice of dead cow with some cheap metal and string to hold it together. Yet the bags go for thousands of dollars.

Any luxury product can be reduced to absurdity this way, but it's not very useful in understanding the culture that produces and values them.

Every time people make fun of luxury products I wonder what cars they're driving: 20 year old clunkers? What shirts they're wearing: $5 for a 10 pack off Ali Express? Burlap sacks? Are they typing on $5 cheap unbranded keyboards? Of course not.

Hell, their computers probably cost twice what most people would be willing to pay, even though 90% of the time, they're doing little more than surfing the web and checking emails. But since it's something they're interested in, luxury is justified.

usually you spend a lot more in what you are highly involved in. Your comment is spot on.

Well, value is only what someone will pay for it. Usually it goes hand in hand with scarcity but often propped up by brand (eg if you didn't know it was a Hermes bag, could it demand the same value?)

Are there any good, cheap laboratory wines that can pass blind taste tests?

Numerous double-blind studied have shown experts can't tell the difference between common table wine and expensive bottles.[0][1] The whole thing is absurd.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgment_of_Paris_(wine)

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-wine-econ...

I don't think those links support your claim. The Judgment of Paris was between high-end California and Bordeaux wines. The received wisdom of the time was that California Bordeaux-style wines (or, more generally, anything from the New World) were inferior to true Bordeaux wines. The Judgment of Paris showed that wasn't true. But they certainly didn't use California table wine.

And the study you link to just seems to show that judges don't rank wines in competition very consistently. I don't think that table wines are often entered into these sorts of competitions. I'm fairly confident that someone with a good palette could distinguish between a high-end Bordeaux and Two-Buck Chuck.

Lol, can confirm. I know this won't appeal to our lovable cadre of HN contrarians, but there is a major difference between most high-end bottles and anything you can get for $8 and under. That's not to say that those $40-and-up bottles are always worth the price...or that you'll even like it as much as everyone else paying that price! But the whole thing is not a complete farce. Scarcity, collectibility, buying as investments, and mostly the novelty factor of something you've never tried are what drive prices on individual bottles into the ludicrous range.

Agreed. My partner is a Wine Educator and this is one of her favorite rants. Consider the costs of getting wine onto a store shelf:

- Glass bottle

- Bottling & Labelling

- Transport

- Cork/closure

- Taxes (29% here in Aus)

- Retail Markup - 25-50%

- Promotions, payment processing, business overhead, etc.

An eight dollar bottle of wine does not leave a lot of money for grape growing, harvest, wine making, aging etc, all the good stuff that makes wine tasty. Probably under one dollar.

Some grape varieties cost a lot more than others, e.g. Pinot Noir is expensive to grow and harvest because it has thin skins and so is easily damaged. However, any recent vintage bottle that retails for more than $100 is about meeting a market price point, not production costs.

There's a lot of absurdity. I've also (rarely) done premium tastings in Napa and Sonoma and really appreciated the experience. I've then also left thinking I get a lot more total enjoyment out of the $80 bottle of whiskey than the $80 bottle of wine. (Both of which I realize don't really qualify as high-end.)

Those absolutely qualify as high end. If anyone tells you differently, reach for your wallet because you're being had. The difference between a $10 bottle of wine and a (good) $50 bottle of wine is huge. Beyond that I agree, it all seems like a farce.

Oh I would never pay more than that--or really more like $50-60 myself. And those very rarely.

> Scarcity, collectibility, buying as investments, and mostly the novelty factor of something you've never tried

None of those are "what it tastes like".

Yes they are. Scarcity - it is hard to find something that tastes like it. Novelty - it tastes like something you've never tasted before.

That quote was about the difference between a $40 bottle and a $ludicrous bottle. Across the $8 - $40 range, there's definitely a meaningful difference in what it tastes like.

The most expensive drink I've bought by volume was a '72 to '74 aged sake, and that was most certainly for it scarcity: and because nothing else tastes like it.

Do you have any science to prove your hunch? I've been following this for a while and nothing I've ever read showed that judges can distinguish two buck chuck from high end wine.

Uneducated drinkers wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Once you've tried enough wines, the difference is obvious and nobody debates it anymore. If you drink beer, it's not much different than mistaking Coors Light for your favorite microbrewed Stout.

Again, I would love to see your science. This is the whole point - the expensive wine thing is simply not about taste. Take a $15 chianti and a $150 chianti, blindfold yourself, have someone else pour them, and try and tell which one is more expensive. It will be a 50/50

50/50 on knowing which is which or which one you like?

My wife without fail in blind tasting can tell you which one is which from an age perspective.

Telling the difference between a $10 wine and a $50 wine is not that hard. Getting above $50 it becomes more about how it ages and the complexity of the taste from age. In general a $10 wine will not age well as it is made to drink as soon as it is bottled. If you are paying more it is because the wine will age well.

Agreed. After $30-50 dollars, you're paying for something other than "higher quality" when you pay more. Collectibility, brand, etc...but for $30/bottle a winery can afford to sort every grape by hand, etc.

I'm neither a big wine or beer drinker, but I must say it's way easier to tell a microbrew from a coors light than it is to discern a $10 cabernet from a $1000 cabernet.

Well, part of the reason is that your local microbrew (unless it's a light pilsner which few are) is probably a very different style from the Coors Light. Compare Coors Light to a low-alcohol non-hoppy craft lager and telling them apart will be a lot harder than distinguishing it from a hoppy IPA.

That is certainly true. One of my professors in grad school was really into wine and would periodically host a wine class for the grad students. According to him there is not much difference between a $1000 bottle of wine and a good bottle of ~$30 wine. The main difference is in consistency. A $30 wine could be okay, excellent, or bad. But if you buy a $1000 bottle of wine, you know that it will be excellent.

...unless it's been kept poorly, in which case it will be vinegar.

I used to live in Singapore, which is full of rich people who collect wine and wine shops that cater to them, completely with regulated-humidity cellars etc. Problem is, Singapore is in the tropics, meaning wine often sits around baking in containers for weeks or months on its way to the shop...

Yep. Although given the current trends, we'll soon be able to say the same thing about a $3 Belgian-style and a $30 Belgian-style.

There are dozens of styles of Belgian ale, and differences between them are obvious. There isn't much difference in price. It ranges from https://www.uvinum.co.uk/beer/leffe-brune (£1.22/33cl) to https://www.uvinum.co.uk/beer/westvleteren-12 (£10.76/33cl), the reason for the high cost of Westvlereten being low volume production. https://www.uvinum.co.uk/beer/st-bernardus-abt-12 is very similar and sells for only £1.84/33cl.

I'd be interested to see any study you have that shows judges confusing two buck chuck with high-end stuff. I'm guessing any such judges are just random people off the street... which doesn't say much about whether or not someone with experience can tell the difference, and thus doesn't say much about whether there is a difference.

Rather than being confused with them, 2 buck chuck beat expensive wines at the 2007 California State Fair Commercial Wine Competition: http://abcnews.go.com/WN/story?id=3372578

Wow.

Judging from the Wikipedia article on blind wine taste tests [1], I'm not sure they're all that reliable.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_wine_tasting

You can even dye white wine red and even professional tasters will be fooled[1].

1: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-ta...

Yes, but that's a statement on the distinction between (certain types of) red and white wines, not on the distinction between cheap and (worthwhile) expensive wines.

It's sort of like saying that because you can install Windows on a Mac, there's no difference between an Inspiron and a MacBook Pro.

Students, not professional tasters. "The wine comparison test was carried out by 54 undergraduates from the Faculty of Oenology of the University of Bordeaux."

http://www.daysyn.com/Morrot.pdf

Wine students. I'd expect them to know a lot more about wine than most people.

The wine's colour is part of the experience of drinking wine and affects the perceived flavour. They probably wouldn't have been fooled so easily if they were blindfolded.

Knowing a wine's price also affect its perceived flavour: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/baba-shiv-how-wines-pr...

and any living form is just carbon, nitrogen and oxygen and a spray of metals. So your point is ?

Look up Frank Lin Distillers sometime.