Yes, if you developped the taste for it. If you repeatedly savor something, you will become very familiar with it's taste and notice subtle variations. But you need to savor it slowly and be intent about it, not just consume it rapidly while thinking about other things.

The fun part is that it doesn't have to be fancy. Wine is probably the most extreme example as there's a heavy push to equate fancy (expensive) with tasty but very often the 2 don't correlate. While my favorite wines are from the Burgundy area and can reach insane prices, I will thoroughly enjoy a $4 Vinho Verde.

I've mostly eliminated soda from my diet but recently went back to enjoying the Mexican Coca Cola made with cane sugar. It comes in small bottles. I sip it slowly and enjoy it over the course of an entire meal—still my favorite pairing if I'm going to grill my own hamburgers—and of course with water on the side. It's a very different experience than guzzling an enormous amount of fountain soda with a straw.

There have been numerous double blind tests of wine that show an astonishing lack of difference based on price. The adjectives you use are also common in audiophiles who seem to value very expensive speaker cables etc.

Funny you should mention audio because I enjoy really good audio but on equipment that's often cheaper than run-of-the-mill equipment (and certainly way cheaper than the audiophile hype). Again it comes down to listening and savoring the differences, not the price tag. And a cheap extension cord is more than sufficient when it comes to speaker cables. ;)

> Wine is probably the most extreme example as there's a heavy push to equate fancy (expensive) with tasty but very often the 2 don't correlate.

I would say the poster you're replying to would agree. And while it's true that price is largely unrelated to quality for wine, in blind taste tests, professional sommeliers performing a blind taste test do significantly better than chance when it comes to determining grape variety and country of provenance.[1] Which is to say that there are subtle differences of flavor from wine to wine that are detectable. But again, this is far from saying that expensive wines are better than cheap wines.

[1] https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/05/17/think-wi...

Mexican Coca Cola took me down a rabbit hole. An interesting taste test would be comparing sodas you enjoy with corn syrup to their cane sugar counterpart. Cane sugar Dr Pepper changed my life, finding it and convincing store owners to order it can be a hassle.

I suspect that it's often the cumulative effect of several, on their own maybe imperceptible, differences that separates a good dish from a great one.

you should see /u/batbomb's post above. At least in their small study, they did see a significant difference