my favorite wine comes affordably in a box. there are better box wines than others, and not all wines are appropriate for specific settings.
I can only get buzzed so often and only to a certain amount (I'm over 30), so when I choose to drink I try to get the most out of it. Since money is not a bottleneck in how often I can get buzzed, I think less about it in that context.
> drinking and enjoying wine is not about some 'pretending to be wealthy' feeling.
I'm pretty sure that these two statements are contradictory. Wine tastes good, and it tastes good with other things, but in no way more special than say, other fruit juices or beverages.
Do you maximize the experience of a fine meal with a flight of six different orange juices? No, nobody ever does that. And yet there is certainly as much variation in citrus juice as there is in grape.
Wine is treated differently precisely for the kind of reasons that you have to explicitly disclaim "pretending to be wealthy" as a motivation.
I love orange juice, but I don't want it with my steak.
Although I typically go with my favourite drink of all -- plain water.
Certainly not wine.
If you want to try it out sometime.
No, wine is a bit special here. It's somehow similar to cheese - there is a whole universe of tastes and subtastes based on many factors. You can of course ignore it completely and treat these foods like eggs (or put any other uniformly tasting kind of food here). That's perfectly fine. Or you can discover that there are so many flavors of cheese, with some of them particularly appealing to you - and just let yourself enjoy these.
Of course there are snobs who make a show out of everything, but don't let that spoil the genuine joy of tasting some good wine (or any other food that may or may not be expensive at that moment).
Compare that to the varieties of grapes - there are certainly more strains of grapes in total (5k-10k), but if you restrict yourself to only wine grapes, they are of similar complexity, and the entire grape industry is based on Vitis Vinifera and Vitis Labrusca, whereas Citrus has at least 4 original species.
And Citrus reacts just as well as Vitis Vinifera to terroir, as well - Citrus grown in volcanic soil vs limestone soil vs california loam has a distinctly different composition and flavor.
You're going to have to face it, wine is special because humans have declared it special, not because it's not similar in complexity to dozens of other agricultural, natural, and fermented products :)
> Do you maximize the experience of a fine meal with a flight of six different orange juices
A lot of people usually prefer to not have sweetness in their meal (at least where I live). Conversely I understand that people loving sweetness and not sour or bitter taste are perplexed by wine.
> And yet there is certainly as much variation in citrus juice as there is in grape.
You are underplaying the effect of fermentation, like from milk to a strong blue cheese. But yes other fermented juices could be as interesting, for example I heard Americans were quite into hard cider ("apple wine") in the past
Well, other than the fact that, on top of its own particular taste characteristics, it's also a vehicle for a substance with is both a recreational drug and flavor enhancer, which certainly has an effect on experience when it is consumed that has nothing to do with social pretense.
But ignoring that is a pretty big oversight.
Those are thoughtfully developed mixes, so few if any just out of a bottle and typical pricing is half of a wine pairing (the wine pairing is normally the same as the tasting menu). I wouldn't personally swap a wine pairing for them -- if you think a full menu is too much, you can often get a half or share the wine menu between 2 people, even if the restaurant doesn't mention so. But it is an interesting alternative.