Definitely stay far away from wine if you care about your wallet. With what you have said about teas it would only be a matter of finding the correct wine (I th

Definitely stay far away from wine if you care about your wallet. With what you have said about teas it would only be a matter of finding the correct wine (I think people call it their Eureka wine?) and you would be hooked in a far more expensive habit. My wife is a winemaker, we work on wines together, and we rarely drink wine for the sole purpose of getting drunk. We love wines far more than any other alcoholic beverage, however the quality to price ratio of beer or spirits is orders of magnitude more reasonable than wine when just looking to enjoy an evening. We reserve wine for special occasions, regular get togethers with our industry friends, and when she either come homes with free wine from work or a bottle from another home or professional winemaker looking for opinions. We certainly couldnt afford to regularly drink the wines she makes ($40-$150) but we have a great appreciation for those that can. Drink a beer with a similar level of alcohol and residual sugar to a wine and in almost every case (even most natural wine) the beer will be almost impossible to enjoy. The vast majority of high alcohol beers rely on sugar to strike a balance that the natural components of wine achieve effortlessly. What separated vitis vinifera wine from all other fermented beverages to me is that wine has an ability to effortlessly strike balance no other alcohol can compare with. The romanticism of wine for better or worse has built a market willing to spend significantly more on wine than they do on all but the most expensive spirits in the world. This over millennia has allowed winemakers the freedom to explore, understand, and later control the most minute details of viticulture and enology in the pursuit of eeking out ever more flavor and nuance from fermented grapes.