You can definitely get really good wine cheap. But! Sometimes it's worth it to bump up.
I drink a lot of whites these days because my wife can't tolerate red. I find that there is a sweet spot at about $25 (NYC retail prices) for whites that are noticeably better than cheaper ones -- French whites like Sancerre, decent Chablis, the less fancy Bourgognes; what I think of as new-style California Chardonnays (not oaky, more like French Chards).
Then there's another sweet spot for whites at about $40, which includes some of my favorite bottles ever, which can change your idea about what good wine can taste like, if you don't usually "go there" pricewise.. I'll call out specifically the Alma Fria and Division Chardonnays, both from California, and in general a $40 bottle of Bourgogne will be very special.
I also love natural (spontaneously fermented) wines as discussed in the article, but that's a whole different drinking experience, more like kombucha in a lot of ways than conventional wine.
However, I think that if you bargain hunt and don't go for "favorite bottles" you should never have to spend more than $25 for a really good wine. If you divorce yourself from reviews and labels, and pick the wine solely based on region, varietal, grower/producer, and year, there are great wines all over the place, and you end up finding new things you never would have tried before.
And there are $80 bottles of wine that can't be approached by any of the $8 bottles.
The thing is, both businesses are about both very subjective taste, and about marketing. You'll need to find what works for you, and roll with that. In both areas, spending more money makes it more likely you avoid the absolute disasters, but it doesn't guarantee you get something more than mediocre.
I agree very much. With whiskey I can generally say, I like the more expensive ones (to a limit) better, but then I also like the cheap 10yo (~$35) Laphroaig better than their more expensive 15yo (~$118) one.
I just remember being thunderstruck by the fact that something so cheap was (for my taste) better than Van Winkle. (Which I considered in general overpriced, but still pretty damn good.)
Price certainly varies with variety. A Pinot might be $20-40 while a cab would be more like $40-80 for the same quality.
Perrin's CdR is ~$10 I believe—we used to drink that almost every day when we lived in NY. Also Jelu from Argentina is a fantastic Pinot Noir for ~$10 as well I believe.
Be careful with your price ranges there, the most expensive wines in the world are Pinot Noirs!
But pricing doesn't really scale with alcohol content, in particular given the extra work required to create whisk(e)y.
I actually did some research, and my above comment isn't really right. Whisky is priced as a luxury good, the pricing isn't really related to cost price.
Despite Australian taxes, Ardbeg 10 will set you back $85.90 for a 70cl in Australia, AU$76 in Britain, and AU$80 in the USA.
Price only really scales to alcohol content for spirits and beer in Australia though, not wine. You can buy a 5 L box of wine for $9.
I enjoy great wine and it seldom costs more than $8 a bottle. Some people really want to buy expensive things for the sake of luxury alone, and since wine is so easy to make (and apparently to project your tastes onto) we have amazing choices at nearly all price points.
I'm not just being blue collar, either --- I'll readily admit that very expensive whiskey tastes VERY different from cheap whiskey, and much better too. There's no such thing as a $8 bottle of whiskey that tastes just as good as $90 bottle, but that's exactly how wine works. And, I suspect it's exactly why there's such price variation too. (I mean variation in the sense that a cheap bottle is as high quality as an expensive bottle. For whiskey, a cheap bottle is low quality, and an expensive bottle can be high quality.)