This may be true in the US but it's not true in Germany and Austria. In Vienna, you can get a very tasty bottle of local white wine for $3, at any grocery stor

This may be true in the US but it's not true in Germany and Austria. In Vienna, you can get a very tasty bottle of local white wine for $3, at any grocery store. Spend $10 and you'll have something amazing. It'll be fresh, crisp, and tasty. You can get giant jugs of wine for $15 or less, again local, again delicious. Maybe not what an expert would consider wonderful, but nothing like the sickly cheap whites you get in the US. (At least, all the ones I've tried.) In many restaurants in Austria, the house wine is the cheapest beverage other than tap water and single espresso. The thing is wine is both a bigger industry, and a smaller industry, compared to the US. It seems like half the restaurants in Vienna have a house wine (and I don't just mean "their cheap brand" -- but house wine they, or their family, or their friends, make and sell). There are practically infinite "brands" because making wine is such a tradition. And yet it's not super commercialized. Most of the time you go to a restaurant, you just order "white" or "red". With few exceptions, there's not the worshipping of the brand names or prices. Heuriger are a kind of biergarten, but for wine; they make their own, that's all they serve to drink, and often you can dine among the grape vines that provide the grapes to make the wine you're drinking. In the summer, you drink weissweing'spritzt… wine with soda water, with Almdudler (a local herbal soda), apple juice, or elderflower syrup and soda. You order the wine to the table by the liter (it's not coming in bottles), and you share with your friends. This would send a snobby wine aficionado into conniptions and I myself thought it was a bit sketchy at first, but damn, it's delicious (and fun - and cheap). Every fall, sturm arrives in every lokale -- the fresh, immature wine. Suddenly everybody is selling it and everybody's drinking it (and everybody's got a raging headache the next day). Wine is part of the cultural landscape there in a way that I've not seen anywhere in the US. Wine is practically like hot & cold running water in Austria -- practically a utility. It's omnipresent and, in true socialist fashion, cheap enough for everyone, all the time.