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.