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When people find out I’m a wine guy, the questions usually follow. “What’s a good wine with steak?” “What’s the best wine you’ve ever had?” “No, seriously now, what’s your real name?” And a more vexing one: “is expensive wine actually worth it?” I have trouble with this question mostly because the response gets a little complicated. By the time I’m done, people usually wish they’d asked for something simpler, like a thesis on the geopolitics of African debt relief.

Anyway, we’ve got some time here, so the answer is: sometimes, maybe even usually, but not quite in the way you might think. (See? It’s already convoluted, and we’ve barely gotten started.) Obviously, “better” is a matter of personal taste. You might try all the pricey and allegedly great wines out there and decide that $15 wine still rocks your world. But if not, and you’re occasionally moved by wine carrying a tariff not entirely unlike your rent check…well, welcome to the club. Sorry you had to join us.

“Great” wines earn their reputations in this fashion: better balance, a more seductive texture, and more complexity. An inexpensive cabernet might taste of blackberries, while a top-of-the-line version could be a beautiful mélange of cassis, tobacco, thyme, cedar, well-aged leather, graphite, and so on. While it’s true that there are less pricey wines that exhibit many of these wonderful qualities, there aren’t many of them, especially in this age of free-flowing information and a U.S. currency on par with the yen. The era of the well-kept secret or hidden wine shop bargain is very nearly over.

Given this, you may sensibly ask if a $150 wine actually delivers ten times the pleasure of a $15 version. But that’s not really the right question. Wine’s like any other luxury good (no one actually needs triple-digit-priced alcohol, except perhaps my editor) in that as the price escalates, the returns diminish. That said, the specific qualities of a $150 wine might not be reproduced in another wine at any price. Individuality is a big reason people drop serious cash on a wine, a shoe, a teaspoon of caviar, or whatever.

So here’s the obvious follow-up: how do expensive wines get that way? Grapes are grapes, right? How can two bottles of fundamentally similar liquid be hundreds of dollars apart? Are the grapes for the pricey ones crushed by giggling supermodels? (And if so, is there video?)

Usually, it’s econ 101; escalating cost follows escalating demand. If people are willing to spend $750 a bottle for something, why should a winery sell it for $50 and let middlemen hoover up all the profit? There’s also the prestige factor, wherein producers arbitrarily raise their prices to appeal to people for whom the implied exclusivity of a high price is a positive. There was a recent and much-publicized study that demonstrated this: tell people a wine costs more, and they’ll usually prefer it to the exact same wine at a lower price.

Sometimes, though, there are more tangible reasons. Industrial producers use pretty much every grape they can get their hands on, but those with more ambition regularly drop perfectly good grapes on the ground, both during and after the growing season. Why? Fewer grapes means more concentration and flavor in the ones that remain, and post-harvest sorting eliminates spoiled grapes. Both of which lead to better wine, but also less wine. And doing these and things by hand rather than machine – a practice most high-quality wineries follow – increases costs.

Real estate is also a factor. Grape-worthy land in, say, the Napa Valley is very, very expensive. And so, to support planting vines rather than an garish faux-Tuscan villa on a given site, there has to be a significant return on the investment. Many Old World producers, the vineyards for which are owned by families whose grape-growing history stretches into centuries, don’t have this problem, and can charge less as a result…though of course this doesn’t mean that they do.

Finally, some wines are just expensive to make. Champagne, for example, has to rest in the winery’s cellar for years before it can be sold. And even though it’s generating zero income, the producer pays taxes on this inventory. Every year. It’s like having some deadbeat cousin on your living room sofa, eating your food and drinking your booze, but contributing nothing. When Champagne finally gets kicked off the couch, someone’s got to pay for those years of sloth. That someone is you.

(First published in stuff@night, 2008.)