And Beenie Babies!
There’s a “craft” distillery near me that makes bourbon on premises. They have tours, it’s a small place, and you can watch them grind and cook the corn etc. Actually made on site. No just finishing. But I’m sure many are as you describe though.
I don’t see anything wrong with a business using premade materials - most of them do. But if they are not mere middlemen they should have to add something to it in order to market their product as artistic. Since there is clearly money to be made selling alcohol it would be interesting to know what is and isn’t permitted.
That sounds like an oxymoron of sorts. I am skeptical of the existence of such a thing.
That’s partly true, but needs some qualification. There is a vast difference between a great wine and a mediocre one, and there is a vast range of qualities in between, the judgment of which is at least partly subjective. The real truth is that there is not always a strong correlation between price and quality. Some expensive wines can be disappointing, and occasionally some inexpensive ones surprisingly good. The other truth, IMHO, is that beyond a certain price point you get diminishing returns. There’s no way that a wine costing hundreds of dollars is going to be worth it in any objective terms, and in most such cases I bet I could find a wine for one-quarter the price that, in a blind taste test, would have wine snobs arguing over which is better. 
IOW, wine is just like food: there is a vast range of quality that only roughly correlates with price; some of it is very good vale for the money, and some of it is outrageously overpriced.
And of course, at the very bottom, quality will always be sacrificed to squeeze that last 10-20% out of the price.
My motto: “You don’t always get what you pay for. But you never get what you don’t pay for.”
I believe the vast difference in quality between a great wine and an average one exists, but not to the same degree for every person. At all.
In “Think Like A Freak”, economists send an “application fee” to Wine Spectator for a deliberately foul wine and still wind up winning an Excellence award and an invitation to advertise it in upcoming issues. This is a remarkable example of bluff - an award you can buy. There is no reason.to think these are unusual.
There are many good and very good wines which are reasonably priced. Not all of them would go well with spicy food, for example. You could certainly get a good or very good wine for well under forty dollars if you chose your country, year and type well.
Well, sure, and some people just don’t like wine at all. But I would maintain that those with a moderate amount of experience with wine would quite often be in general agreement about a great vs an average or mediocre wine.
I keep hearing stuff like this, and find a lot of it hard to believe. Unless your point is that some wine reviews or reviewers can be “bought” which may well be true. I don’t always agree with wine critics by any means, but I can’t recall any time that I found a wine with a great rating truly terrible. At worst, I might sometimes wonder what all the fuss was about.
Here’s an example of an unintentional blind taste test. A while ago someone sent me a somewhat old review that absolutely raved about a certain low-priced Spanish Merlot, emphasizing that it was specifically the 2017 vintage they were talking about, which even then was almost sold out, and that the newer 2018 was just ordinary. I decided to pick one up anyway just to try.
I took one sip and found it amazing! I thought the guy was nuts for calling it “ordinary”. Then I checked the label more carefully, and by golly, it was the famed 2017, of which my local store had apparently got in some old stock. I rushed back later and rather selfishly bought out their entire supply.
The moral of the story is that there really is a certain amount of objectivity in wine rating. I keep hearing stories like the claim that wine experts couldn’t even tell the difference between red and white wines if they were blindfolded. What utter rubbish!
Life may be a vale of tears, but obviously I meant “…some of it is very good value for the money”. Thank you for not ridiculing my silly typo. 
I generally agree with your motto, but ironically I think every once in a long while wine can be an interesting exception. There are some wines, like that Spanish Merlot, that could easily be selling for 50% or even 100% more, and it’s a real mystery to me why it doesn’t. The 2018, while not stellar like the previous year, is still really good and is my default house wine now.
Another example was a Cabernet Franc from a local Ontario vineyard that had one absolutely fantastic release one particular year (can’t remember the vintage – I think maybe 2011). I had not seen any reviews and just picked it up at random, and was absolutely bowled over by it. When I described it to a fellow wine lover, he rushed out and scoured every liquor store in the area and cleaned them out. Later on, he sent me a review he had found that praised it to high heaven, and thanked me for the advance notice of how great it was. Point being, the price the year that miraculous vintage was released was no different than any other year (around $17). Sometimes you really do get extraordinary value.
Blue Chip guitar picks.
I guess where I draw the line personally is when they’re basically taking a pre-made product and spiffing it up a bit, and selling it as if they distilled it themselves. That’s the kicker- the implication that they made this vodka from first principles- i.e. they ground their own corn, they mashed it, they fermented it, and they distilled it, filtered it, etc… all themselves. Which they most certainly did not do.
It’s like if a bakery bought parbaked loaves like the bake-at-home loaves you can buy at home, and then set themselves up as an “Artisanal Bakery”. That implies that they’re mixing flour, water, salt, and yeast, kneading it, letting it rise, punching it down, letting it rise a second time, and then baking it. Which they’re not- they’re just baking someone else’s bread. Maybe there’s some artistic leeway in whatever seeds they sprinkle on it, or if they brush it with egg wash or butter, and in how long they bake it. But they fundamentally did not make the bread.
I guess I’m a little (just a little) bit more forgiving of the whiskey makers who age someone else’s distilled spirits (the MGP 95% rye for example), as there’s a lot of skill and know-how in aging and blending whiskey that’s independent of just distlling the white dog. Using the bread analogy, it would be like a crouton maker buying parbaked loaves and baking them to make croutons. Not 100% on the up-and-up, but their mark is made in the seasoning and re-baking of the bread, not in the initial bake itself.
But vodka is neither aged nor blended. Buying ADM bulk grain neutral spirits and either redistilling it or filtering it is just lame. And borderline deceptive, IMO.
I used to help prepare our local base for ISO audits, and it was just about as apparently pointless as Spoons said.
I say “apparently” because in my area of industry (oilfield services) there was one solid reason for having ISO certification: most of our oil company clients required it to even consider a bid for services. Now, why did they require it? Mainly to show they were carrying out due diligence to reduce potential exposure to liability if something unfortunate occurred, like, I don’t know, an offshore well blowing out and polluting most of the Gulf of Mexico. Well, something maybe a little less extreme than that.
pretty much any “luxury” brand of anything. Perhaps a Louis V handbag uses nominally better leather, perhaps the stitching is a little better, metal clasps instead of chrome painted plastic. But the price difference between a Target handbag and a Louis V handbag is hardly justified by quality.
As valid as your point may be, I will note that I laid out that kind of money on a bicycle, which was not carbon fibre, bladed spokes, any of that racing stuff. The hydraulic brakes added about a hundred to the price, and I got a few add-ons, but by far the most expensive small component was the Rohloff geared hub, which was over a thousand dollars on its own. Fully kitted, I believe the bike would weigh at least 35lbs. It cost so much because it is a very well made German recumbent with full suspension.
Double-blind taste tests dispute this. If I recall tasters can generally pick out the bad wines but after that it’s a crap shoot. I don’t know of any respected tests where tasters could find the expensive wine. It’s not something I’ve done extensive research on so there may be some.
One of the tests was done at a Cambridge student wine club IIRC. It would be fair to say they may have some experience with good wines but not years of expertise. That said, they have more than the average person. A test of sommeliers may produce different results. These tests are anecdotal. I am not a sommelier, I have already done such a test among me and some friends years ago.
So I know for me, a fine wine tastes somewhat better than a good one but not so much that I wouldn’t rather have better food.
I’m not really disagreeing with anything you’ve said, and I definitely lay no claim to being a wine connoisseur or even close, but I consume a lot of the stuff to the point that I rarely have a dinner without a glass of wine or three. Based on that, I’d say that I and my fellow wine aficionados probably appreciate a really great wine more than the average occasional wine consumer, though none of us have ever spent ridiculous amounts on a single bottle. When we really, really like something, though, it’s not unusual for any of us to spend ridiculous amounts on a case or two of good stuff.
As for “better food”, there is a wonderful intricate linkage between the two. An appropriate wine not only enhances the food, but the food very often enhances the wine, especially robust full-bodied reds that may seem overwhelming when drank by themselves, but absolutely glow in the harmony of a matching food. It’s truly a synergy, and one of life’s pleasures.
One of my favorite pastimes, which I don’t indulge in nearly often enough, is going to a great restaurant at a local winery, which always features a prix fixe menu option with matching wines selected for each course by their sommelier. Every time I’m there I fantasize about becoming a billionaire and either buying the place or hiring away their head chef.
You need to concentrate on what is important to you.
But there is a world of difference between identifying which wine is the good one (only partly correlated to price), which is the pricy one, identifying it as a good year Chablis, and knowing it is a 1993 Chateau Wagga-Wagga Grand Chablis tasting of Asian Pear with grapes grown on the sunny side of the hill.
Now, I’ve never bought a handbag in my life but it seems that if you’re acknowledging that the materials, hardware and workmanship of the luxury brand are better than the discount store brand, you’re admitting that the price difference is more than just bullshit. Now you may not think the expensive goods are worth the additional cost, but that’s different than saying the differences are illusionary. (There was a thread a few years ago in which one regular poster who owns an expensive bag described the quality of the item and the differences between it and a discount store bag and offered the opinion that the cost (in the hundreds of dollars, as I remember) was worth it.)