As most of you have noted, conspicuous consumption is the primary reason. Rarity plays a role too. There just isn’t that much base material floating around to make Louis XIII. Or Hennessy Paradis, etc… And you are competing with every rich person on the planet who wants some. Whether the rich person could tell the difference between Louis XIII and Remy XO is another question entirely. They probably could, if comparing them side by side, but just in a glass, by itself? Maybe, I suppose. I guess it would depend on how often they drank that beverage. I like vintage Champagne and Salon Le Mesnil is probably the finest white wine I’ve ever had. But if you poured it for me in a glass by itself, I’d recognize it was very very good, but I wouldn’t realize just how good, unless I had some other very good champagnes to compare it with. FWIW, my biggest bangs for the buck in Cognac style beverages are the products from the Germain-Robin distillery, in California, of all places. Especially their XO.
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For the 25 year old wine question, it really depends on one’s individual experience, I think. (This of course assumes things are storage, grape variety, producer: are all such to make a wine that can age and develop for 25 years.) Older wines taste and look much different than young wines, sometimes shockingly so. Compare old Sauternes (dark gold to brown, often not very sweet) to young (bright yellow, profoundly sweet) for a vibrant example. Without context, someone might look at the old Sauternes and think it was garbage, instead of realizing that’s how it’s supposed to look, taste, and smell at that age. Kevin Zraly, in one of his Windows on the World wine course books, tells a similar story. Many things require context to help you figure out just how good they are.
As far as cost and rarity go, in the wine business at least, the wine maker Brendan Eliason has a delightful post on just where the costs of a bottle of wine come from here. The figures are, IIRC, about 15 years old. Probably a similar story is true for Ferrari. Although, they do have significant R&D costs in the form of their Formula 1 race team. Per this site, they spent $295 million in 2010. Here are some production figures for Ferrari. They only go to 2001, where 4305 cars were made. Let’s be extremely generous and say they made 10,000 cars in 2010. Then, to recover what they spent just in F1 (not counting any other motor sports campaigns), they’d need to tack on about $30,000 per car. As any manufacturing engineer will tell you, low volume adds tremendously to your per unit costs.
To follow on to your figures Gray Ghost, rarity does not necessarily mean higher quality. In your Ferrari example, those 4300 cars will very likely be LESS dependable than that $30,000 Honda you purchased. Primarily because Honda built, tested, and USED UP 4000 Hondas before they sold 300,000 a year to their customers.
There are things you just won’t experience until you have a certain number of cars and repair them. We saw stuff in our Corvettes that were symptomatic of only producing 30,000 vehicles a year that you wouldn’t see in a car that sells 500,000 a year.
I have always felt that liquors like that are displayed for the purposes of selling less expensive (but still expensive) liquors.
Let’s say I walk into a liquor store with the rather vague intention of buying a “really good bottle of cognac” as a gift for a client, not really knowing what to expect. When I see the $1800.00 bottle my jaw drops. Now there is no way I am going to buy that, but it makes me feel a lot better about buying that $150.00 bottle of XO. Had I walked in there and the top price was $150.00, I might have slid by with the $75.00 bottle instead. I mean, hey, my client is a good client, but he’s not the best client.
Many Class Sixes on military bases have these ultra-high end bottles of liquor in a case. I asked the clerk once, and he said they’re all special order items, and they don’t have any in stock. For all I know, the bottles on display are filled with colored water. I also asked him if they actually sold any, and he said they sell maybe half a dozen a year to various retired ballers. He said it’s almost always old dudes.
So basically, they’re out nothing for putting the bottles on display except the floor space, and it does help to add an air of legitimacy to the whole operation.
In blind taste tests, even that is not true. Research conducted on wine preference using blind taste tests shows that there is actually an inverse corelation between wine preference and wine price - the average person actually prefers less expensive wines to more expensive ones, and even wine aficianados are more likely to prefer the less expensive wine. On the flip side, research has shown that people tend to prefer the wine that they think is more expensive, even if they are in reality tasting two glasses of wine from the same bottle.
If you are interested in wine, get the book “Wine Trials of 2011”. The author discusses the research being done on wine taste and cost, and then gives a nice list of inexpensive good wines.
It’s worth noting that Dom Perignon is owned by Moët & Chandon , which is in turn owned by a company that also owns the following companies:
Hennessy
Fendi
Donna Karan
Givenchy
Louis Vuitton
Thomas
Parfums Christian Dior
TAG Heuer Watches and Jewelry
Sephora
De Beers