I frequently prefer cheaper wines to more expensive ones, and agree price-quality correlation is not good, depending on what your wine source is, but at the same time you're going to have to find good data to demonstrate no correlation: for price is one (flawed but still input-data-rich) indicator!
We do fool ourselves with patterns, but also we do not. AFAIK there is not enough research to rove it either way, but qualitative methods can point us to better theories to work with until we have good enough constructs for quantitative analysis for our minds' perceptions.
I don't understand this. Flavourful chemicals aren't a scarce resource to "go around" -- they're organic compounds plants synthesise "from scratch" (or their reaction products, after aging). Perhaps scarce soil nutrients influence this, for better or worse (I don't know), but this isn't a priori obvious.
Wikipedia didn't help me resolve this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yield_(wine)#Yield_as_an_indic...
I tried and failed (wikipedia) -- can you point me to something informative? I don't know what I'm looking for.
There is a finite number of nutrients in the soil, and the plant can make a finite amount of such things out of these nutrients (like phenols in the grape skins and... er.. this is not my subject, but I can look it up again myself should I have to).
In general they're not finite. Phenols are just C,H,O -- they're made from water and CO2. All of these compounds, as far as I can tell:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenolic_content_in_wine
I haven't found anything that says that, for example, soil nutrients correlate with phenol concentrations in vines (for example). It's not obvious.
How do you know that after "honing your palate" you you'll calibrate your sense of taste to actual quality of wine, rather than to whatever the difference is between more and less expensive ones? People can learn to see any kind of patterns if they try hard enough, but that doesn't mean those patterns are in any way useful or relevant.