site banner
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

To those of you getting mad at the notion that someone might not see the appeal of 200 USD wine, do you really derive 10x the satisfaction than a 20 USD wine? If yes, is that satisfaction in your taste buds or knowing that you can spend 200 USD on fermented grapes?

Speaking for bourbon rather than wine, but I don't need to get 10x the satisfaction for it to be worth it - I can only drink so much bourbon and having a few of those pours be expensive is worthwhile to me. Even at a $200 bottle (which is a price I haven't paid yet), I'd be looking at roughly 16 1.5 oz pours, which makes them about $12.50 per pour. If we're thinking wine bottles, we're talking about $40/glass. Both of those are expensive! But they're also well within the range of prices that normal, upper-middle class people can swing without changing anything about their lives otherwise, at least when we're talking about the occasional treat.

Put another way, there's no meaningful tradeoff that I'm making. The marginal dollars that I spend on nice bourbon would otherwise add nothing to my life. I can easily imagine this calculus shifting much, much farther if I made a lot more money.