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Buying expensive wine - no, that doesn't make me happy. Drinking high-quality wine, which sometimes happens to be expensive - absolutely. I enjoy that very muc
by gyardley 16y ago
Buying expensive wine - no, that doesn't make me happy. Drinking high-quality wine, which sometimes happens to be expensive - absolutely. I enjoy that very much.
Claiming that my enjoyment of high-quality wine is an illusion because you can't see a difference is just arrogance. The same goes for the consumption of any other luxury good you might not have a taste for yourself.
- _delirium 16y agoI do think that there are high-quality things that are expensive, but I think people buy by price rather than by blind quality tests relatively frequently. There are good expensive wines, but the wine price/quality correlation is not very strong at all. If you actually know what you're buying and how to judge it, though, by all means buy whatever you want! I've personally been something of a beer aficionado for 5-6 years now, and I've seen this creeping into craft brewing quite a bit lately. Especially after the explosion in the last 1-2 years of mainstream popularity, there's now a very weak relationship between the quality of beer you get and whether you pay $3 or $30 for a 22-oz bottle. Tons of good stuff and crap across the spectrum, and increasingly manufacturers are pricing as a way of status-signaling rather than based on either cost or quality. There have even been cases of brewers rebadging the same recipe from a middle-range beer as high-end premium stuff with a fancy label, and it sells and gets good reviews! (But it doesn't do any better in blind taste tests.)