This argument can be extended to any luxury good - why buy a Porsche when a VW will get you there? Why buy a silk sweater when you've a perfectly serviceable woollen hand-me-down?
Obviously these things are not equivalent. The car you buy, the sweater you wear, and the wine you drink are a few of the many little things that make a person who they are - in a sense, they're the distinctions that comprise the very essence of culture. What is a person (when viewed through another's eyes) if not the product of the decisions they make? And what is knowing someone, if not having an understanding of how they reach their decisions?
Not all wine is created equal - that's just true. Like food, code, art, music, and math, it's a thing that becomes more appreciable with knowledge. A lot of people would be just as impressed by a+b=c as they would be by Euler's identity, the Zeta function, or e=mc^2: normal people don't go around talking about the beauty of math, and yet those that know about it are captivated by it. It's the same story with Lispers and "Maxwell's equations of software". Are they deluded? No. Is it completely subjective and worthless? No - there is real, objective awesomeness in these examples.
Wine is not math or Lisp, but it's also not 100% bullshit (probably more like 60%.) This article is just another "please be like me" appeal, and they're getting dull now. There's potentially a lot of joy to be had by liberating your tastebuds from the likes of Gallo. $5/btl wine is not great stuff - it was probably a grape less than a month ago, and when you take into account vineyard margin, distributor margin, retail margin, the bottle, labelling, taxes, and shipping, you find the actual liquid in the bottle was created for pennies. It's treated with additives, flavourings, and sugar to make it both palatable and consistent: the grape is but a substrate. Like pink slime. $5/btl wine is the 1990's McNugget of the booze world. Each and every bottle is a shrine to engineered mediocrity.
I agree with everything you said, except that in some countries like France, wine is -by definition- not a luxury good. And I would dare to say, that culturally is not treated like that either.
In other places, like my country of origin Chile, wine is actually legally a luxury good. It has a luxury good tax, and it's culturally viewed as a luxury good by most of the Chilean society.
I would like wine to be a closer thing for people in my Country and here in the States. Like a good book that your local bookstore could suggest you to read could change your life. A good wine, recommended by your local -serious- cavista could change your life too.
In a society that's pretty much immersed in Fast Food and Soda, this would be like a refreshing breeze of cool air :)
My adventure with wine got serious when I actually noticed that I had been drinking crap. I was fortunate to try a Pichon Longueville Comtesse de Lalande 1990 like 6 years ago. That wine is from Bordeaux, and even if I don't drink Bordeaux actively anymore, it marked my life.
There are a lot of wines that have marked me and my taste, and most of them are not expensive.
-> Louis Antoine Luyt "País de Quenehuao" got me into natural wine. (10 bucks in Chile)
-> Domaine Ostertag "Riesling" Got me into white wine. (~20 bucks?)
-> Kenjiro Kagami "Poulsard" Domaine De Miroirs, showed me how edgy and how much tension a wine could have. (maybe 30 bucks)
I could elaborate for hours, like good books, a lot of wines that I tasted are memories that I hold deeply in my heart.
I was also lucky enough to meet a great group of people who helped me to shape my own taste, suggest new exciting stuff or even share great bottles with me...
The vast majority of people shouldn't even consider buying a new car, let alone a Porsche: a cheap, used car that costs a few thousand dollars is all they should be able to afford without vastly overextending themselves on their incomes.
Obviously these things are not equivalent. The car you buy, the sweater you wear, and the wine you drink are a few of the many little things that make a person who they are - in a sense, they're the distinctions that comprise the very essence of culture. What is a person (when viewed through another's eyes) if not the product of the decisions they make? And what is knowing someone, if not having an understanding of how they reach their decisions?
Not all wine is created equal - that's just true. Like food, code, art, music, and math, it's a thing that becomes more appreciable with knowledge. A lot of people would be just as impressed by a+b=c as they would be by Euler's identity, the Zeta function, or e=mc^2: normal people don't go around talking about the beauty of math, and yet those that know about it are captivated by it. It's the same story with Lispers and "Maxwell's equations of software". Are they deluded? No. Is it completely subjective and worthless? No - there is real, objective awesomeness in these examples.
Wine is not math or Lisp, but it's also not 100% bullshit (probably more like 60%.) This article is just another "please be like me" appeal, and they're getting dull now. There's potentially a lot of joy to be had by liberating your tastebuds from the likes of Gallo. $5/btl wine is not great stuff - it was probably a grape less than a month ago, and when you take into account vineyard margin, distributor margin, retail margin, the bottle, labelling, taxes, and shipping, you find the actual liquid in the bottle was created for pennies. It's treated with additives, flavourings, and sugar to make it both palatable and consistent: the grape is but a substrate. Like pink slime. $5/btl wine is the 1990's McNugget of the booze world. Each and every bottle is a shrine to engineered mediocrity.