I’m a little confused about the burger analogy, as folks compare $10 burgers to $100 burgers. What ever happened to dollar menu burgers?
And that said, if you’re one of the many who likes to sneer at wine connoisseurs because they can’t tell the difference between red and white wine, be sure you have your facts straight. The studies in the field are often–as in this thread–vastly misrepresented, and often depend on techniques more appropriate to stage magic than to rigorous science.
Of course not. But it strongly suggests that the connoisseur culture of those goods depends on something more than their flavor profile, like alcoholic beverages, which is the point I was making. At least that’s the milder version of the point. The stronger version is that alcohol 's appeal is so strongly drug-mediated that if you take it away, the other prestige factors lose most of their potency.
I’m fine eating cheaper meat when I can’t eat ribeye. But nobody wants a barrel of 20-year whatever that tastes like watery, smoky maple syrup and isn’t a drug.
People have preferences about NA beer, as they do for anything we put into our gut. And NA is no doubt getting more sophisticated and passable to the real thing, and this will continue (to a point). But there is no connoisseur culture for non-alcoholic beverages, and there never will be.
Not only can you find a $6,000 burger as pointed out by @Elmer_J.Fudd, but you can also get a $1 burger at a drive through. So yeah, a 6000x times difference. Can you tell me that the $6,000 burger has 6000x the nutritional value?
So, is food a drug? If not, then how do you explain why people pay lots of money for the same basic ingredients that could be had for a small fraction of the cost?
This is untrue. One is a group of people who don’t appreciate being told that their appreciation of a good drink is drug seeking behavior, and the other is a group of people who think that their palate is more refined than it actually is.
Really, most of the difference between a $10 bottle and a $1000 bottle is bragging rights. It has nothing to do with drug seeking behavior.
Agree and disagree. It’s not drug seeking behavior because the alcohol level of a 1961 Latour and a box of last week’s Chilean Malbec will both clock in around 12 - 14%. There will be, however, a wide variety of flavors and aromas that are different. The Latour will have depth and subtleties that don’t exist in the box wine. Now, I will grant right up front that the more expensive a wine gets, the less detectable differences there are. That’s true for just about anything. But even someone with a naugahyde palate can tell the difference between a box wine and say the Margaux I had for Christmas.
$10 < $100 = easy. $100 < $500 = not so much. $500 < $1000 = pure status. The wine has now become a Veblen good.
I’m certainly not saying that there is no difference between a cheap wine and an expensive one, nor that there are those who can tell the difference and appreciate it.
What I am saying that when many people order a $1000 bottle of wine, they are doing so so that they can say they ordered a $1000 bottle of wine. Even if they can taste and appreciate the difference, they aren’t spending that money just for that special nuanced flavor.
But, they also aren’t just buying it to get a buzz off the alcohol either, which was my main point there.
Ah, but that seems to be the OP’s main point. It just comes off as a screed against “drug use” by a “born-again” abstainer.
Anybody spending a grand on a bottle of wine for the buzz needs to come see me. I have a few bridges they might like to buy as well. 
I don’t see there’s any way to say that confidently. I disagree. There’s a connoisseur culture (some more niche than others) with everything when it comes to matters of taste. I’m a “connoisseur” of low-brow food like fast food hamburgers, ma & pop hot dog stands, pizzas, etc., and I know plenty others who are similar. There’s entire message boards for that kind of “food and drink enthusiasm.” It’s not limited to alcoholic beverages. Look at bottled water snobs, for instance. Or, even better, mineral water, where the mineral composition varies things up quite a bit. There are people who talk about which brands have “soft” bubbles and “hard” bubbles in regards to combination, what kinds of mineral tastes and overtones, mouthfeel, pH, etc. It’s not as widespread a culture as the rest, but certain folks geek out to it like it is wine or beer.
The fact that making alcohol is probably mankind’s oldest industry (not profession) certainly lends it a whole lot of cultural weight. People have been practicing different methods of brewing and distilling long before we had writing.
I think that that is a much larger part of the reason that alcoholic beverages continue to be an important part of our culture than the simple desire to get buzzed.
I would have a few bottles of re-labeled Two Buck Chuck.
“No, really. All Grand Crus come with twist-tops these days!”
Limited Edition. The cork harvest was severely affected by COVID.
Screw caps are great, and don’t have to be indicative of a cheap wine. From my understanding, they actually have many advantages over cork. I actually would buy a screw top wine in preference to a cork wine in the same price range because I didn’t have to go fiddling for my corkscrew or worry about a dried-out cork breaking mid-removal.
But they do have a bit of a trashy association with them, just like box wines (which actually can be very good these days.)
Hence my references to Chilean Malbec, a box of which resides in my fridge right now. Quite acceptable, and it doesn’t fuck up the taste of your cheeseburger! 
The fail rate of corks is high enough that if it occurred in any other industry, Major Changes Would Be Made and Heads Would Roll.
“I recently obtained a Franzia Rose 43. One of the best weeks ever.”
I usually only buy wine in a box or with a screw top, as I barely drink wine and mostly use it for cooking, which means that a bottle may last a few weeks. An open screw top or a bag in a box stays “fresh” a lot longer than an uncorked bottle does.
Sounds like someone can’t stop focusing on getting high and just assumes everyone else has the same problem. Get some help. Or don’t, but at least be mindful of projecting your hangups on others.
Caffeine (aka coffee) has a lot of this.
Nicotine (cigarettes and cigars) do too, especially cigars.
Cannabis kind of has this. Its not as extreme, I don’t think there are ultra high end forms of weed yet, if there are I haven’t seen or heard of them.
To a large extent, that’s because the base price is so high, and that’s because of the legal status of it.
Were it completely legalized, you could get cheap marijuana at prices not much higher than that of oregano, while carefully bred, cultivated and cured leaf could continue to go for the hundreds an ounce it currently does.
If you think about it, $300 an ounce (not an unreasonable price for some high quality stuff) is already pretty extreme. Even a $1000 bottle of wine is only $40 an ounce.
Apparently there is a strain called caviar that is $1400/oz that is considered high end.