A friend of mine, who used to manage a restaurant, at one point told me that yuppies would regularly order bottles of wine worth tens of thousands of dollars during dinner. Not so much hundreds of thousands, but it was not a starred restaurant, or perhaps inflation? Either way, it should not surprise anyone that even non-famous restaurants have a small fortune in wine in stock, and that (rich) people drink it, be it as a status symbol or because they just really like it.
Agreed. It’s not a matter of how much a “200 year old bottle of fermented grape juice” is inherently worth, if that even means anything. Is a slip of green paper with Benjamin Franklin’s picture on it inherently worth $100?
Yes it is. Kinda by definition, seeing as how a “dollar” is an abstraction to begin with. 