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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   25318 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026

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My brother pointed this out to me about myself once, and it was one of the most cutting (unintentional) insults I've ever received.

Glad to meet a like-minded (lesser) gentleman, haha.

FWIW I think 'lesser' is doing a lot of work here, the only people I've come into contact with who seemed to have the 'furniture' attitude in modern times were on the order of a Duke. Most people below that take some interest in the help, although perhaps with varying levels of performativity and enthusiasm.

Yeah I mean the true super-rich, the kind of people who have too many servants to get attached to individuals. Money's a bit like wine, in that it matters if your bottle of wine is below $20 or above $100, but in between it's pretty much the same.

Makes it less cutting, at least. I know I'm not a Duke, all I have to do is look out of the window at the huge lack-of-tracts-o-land...

it matters if your bottle of wine is below $20 or above $100, but in between it's pretty much the same.

Do you think so? I was always under the impression that it was broadly an inverse-log:

  • under 10GBP is going to be awful unless you select very carefully, and even then the result is going to be petrol-ly
  • 10-20 is perfectly acceptable
  • 40-50 is very nice, actually interesting enough to reward shutting up for a bit and paying attention to the wine. I got 50 GBP Chateauneuf du Pape for the family for Christmas.
  • 100 is going to be good and really special and worth paying attention to and remembering
  • greater than 100 and you're really wasting the extra money unless you have a very refined and educated palate, and even then I suspect the enjoyment is going to be broadly intellectual

I've been given the super-duper nice wine before and it was indeed lovely, especially when it was set up as part of a proper tasting and you were told what to look for, but I'd never consider it worth the money for my own table unless I was replacing what I took out of the family cellar (alas, this is true money territory) or deliberately showing off for some unfathomable reason.

I learned this as a rule-of-thumb from the guys whose job at Stanford is to study the wine business, so I trust them. The way I would put it:

  • Under 10GBP/USD, it will be awful. You cannot sell drinkable wine in the first world at that price.
  • 10-20, it's not bad, but there are noticeable quality sacrifices that you can see in that spectrum.
  • 20 was the anchor for the Stanford guys in part because that's what Duckhorn's Decoy was priced at at the time (now it's $25 on the coasts, still $20ish outside of big cities), and Decoy was their example of the perfect $20 bottle you can get anywhere in the States.
  • 20-100 everything is marketing. Price is a signal, sure, but you can find wines in the low 20s that are better than wines in the 80s, and the difference is marketing/distribution. Also country of origin - imo France has the worst price:quality ratio, because everyone knows that French wine is Fancy, and South Africa has the best because ain't nobody thinking South Africa is Fancy.
  • Above 100 you get into special stuff you just can't make for a lower price point. Some wines that are just bullshit marketing, of course, but for the most part there's going to be something special and expensive like long aging or a notable vineyard. Personally, I'm not sure I've been bitten by the wine bug that badly.

Personally, I would envy the super-rich more if they were doing cool shit with that money. I certainly wouldn't settle for some big houses and a lot of servants.

Interesting. It's not at all what I heard from my father who is big on the Wine Society but admittedly less pedigreed. His contention was that price still pretty much equals taste since so many people take an interest in these things and the feedback is strong. Personally I can't say either way. My experience has fitted with the scale I gave you but that's maybe just the marketing. I'll try and look into it some more.

It may also be different in the UK. I have no idea, but every independent UK wine shop I've wandered into has clearly been discerning and hard-nosed.

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