Scarcity and uniqueness or at least the illusion of thereof is probably the big difference between wine and water. With water you can advertise purity and mayb

Scarcity and uniqueness or at least the illusion of thereof is probably the big difference between wine and water. With water you can advertise purity and maybe some minerals or additives. You might advertise the uniqueness of the source, but I think you get limited by the whole H20 thing. With wine you can bring in the uniqueness of the grapes and the growing (read weather) conditions in a particular little piece of land on the Earth's surface in a given year. In addition to the arguments about the raw material you can add differences in fermenting, bottling, etc. I think wine has a much better set of facts to build a marketing story on. I'd imagine with sufficient technology you could make some really good and standard wine but then the story aspect would be weakened. This isn't to say that I don't think water markup (30$ a bottle) isn't an extremely impressive display of marketing. In terms of a difference between the cost of the base product and the marked up product water is probably even more amazing than wine. I just think that, in commanding absolute amounts, the scarcity arguments for wine probably make a better story.