I paid well over market price once for some, uh, company, soley on her name.  "Monique" was anything but unique.

I made the some mistake purchasing some, uh, product, one time from someone I didn't know.  "Ne Plus Ultra Skunk" was decidely not the wheelchair smoke advertised.

Maybe I should just schedule a long trip to France sometime soon and divest myself of these Francophillusions.

Y'all are a bunch of weasels, with your race-to-the-bottom modesty.

The most I've paid for a bottle of wine is $250, and I've done it three times. The most for dinner was $500, and I've done so twice:

Oooh, we got some big spender here, yessir.  Let me tell you, I have all of you beat.  

Three words, one horrible name:  Good Monk Wine

It had the highest alcohol to price ratio of any wine Albertsons in 1984.  I may have paid three bucks for the 1.75 liter bottle.  However, it did have a direct connection to the woman I would eventually marry.

8 years and $30k later, we divorced.

Friggin' monk.

It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine

Thanks eds for slipping all those extra links.  I was afraid that this article didn't have enough, but you saved the day.

Yeah, I used to buy cheap wines for about $10-15/bottle... now I get mine from the local u-brew guy for $2/bottle or so.  I don't really have to do much of the brewing even, just put in an order and wait a couple months.  I have had one order already, split with a friend, so I didn't even have to do anything for that one.  I think all I'll have to do is go in and stir the wine or something, just once, then it'll be done!

And it is just as good as the cheap wine I used to buy...  

What's the most that you have ever paid for a bottle of wine, or a good meal out on the town?

My husband has been an avid wine enthusiast for many years and has built up a decent collection. So when we go out for an expensive dinner, we bring our own. We know what we're getting, and we avoid the all-too-common huge mark up. If a restaurant has an outlandish corkage fee, we don't go there.

Fortunately, BYOB is common and even encouraged in our area.

While writing this up, I thought of a few stories worth telling from my own experience...

1. About two years ago, some friends of ours decided to have a "best bottle of wine under $10" party. We brought three wines - a $3 bottle, and two $8 bottles. In total there were about 15 or 20 bottles, if memory serves me. The "judge" covered up the labels and then the guests did blind taste testing and put in their picks for #1, #2, and #3. The wine that won was one of our $8 bottles, and it beat out two "ringer" bottles of $20 wine that were put in for kicks. There are good wines and there are bad wines, but quality doesn't correlate all that well with price. If you haven't trained your palate to appreciate the nuances of the drink, there's probably no reason to spend more than $15-$20 on a bottle (liquor store prices - restaurants obviously have quite a markup).

2. When it comes to food / restaurants, you're paying for the entire experience, and sometimes part of the experience is paying more for the food. It's perverse, but paying more can sometimes be satisfying. Knowing that you're paying a lot for something does two things, I think - first, it makes you really take time to enjoy the food and the experience. You might plow through a 1/2 price steak at the Sizzler, but you'll take time and enjoy the $100 kobe beef. No matter what the kobe beef will be better, but if you actually spent as much time savoring the flavors of the cheaper meat, you'd probably still enjoy it more. Second, there's something like the placebo effect going on. If you spend money on something, you expect it to be good, and so you "fool" yourself into liking it more than you otherwise might (and of course the reverse is true - even if that line chef at the Sizzler screws up and actually turns out a good steak, you probably won't appreciate it as much because you don't expect much out of it).

Ce n'est pas une pipe. C'est une signature.

My general rule for vino is to not pay more than $10 for a bottle. I tend to stick to Tempranillos, Cabs, and lately Malbecs. I never had a taste for French wines and with the exception of Montepulciano I don't usually go out of my way for Italian wines either. My wife is pretty much the same way, though she likes a nice Merlot more than I do. We're basically "easy drinking" types. In Spain I don't think we ever ordered anything but the house red ;)

Lucky for us, we live near a really good wine bar that's keen on featuring great wines that aren't too hard on the pocketbook. One of our recent favorites, at about $7 a glass turned out to be less than $10 a bottle from our local wine retailer.
My own reasons for this are two-fold. For one, I like to drink alot of wine, so $30 bottles would really cramp my style unless I won the lottery or gave up other things, like food. Secondly, I don't have the right palate to get all hepped up about serious vintages with serious sticker prices. This is a matter of personal belief, and it's gotten me into arguments with friends, but I defend myself with the following personal anecdote:

I took a truly awesome trip to Tahoe once with a friend. He brought friends, they brought friends, and so on and so on and so on... One of the girls there was a trained sommelier (is there any other kind?) and she was a buyer for Trader Joe's (yeah, the one that sells Two Buck Chuck. No, never tried it). Anyway... she brought along a case of wines, spanning prices, vintages, varietals and terroirs, and we proceeded to taste test just to prove a point. The vast majority of those in attendance preferred the wines that weren't the most expensive or the least expensive. Most of us, myself included, couldn't pick out the pricey bottles in a blind taste test.
That was just one anecdote, but I could add up others from my life.

So... there's the thing. I really like the wines I drink. And not every wine I buy ends up being good; I certainly prefer some to others. But I've found a range that's good for my palate and my pocketbook, so I'm not really tempted to stray into pricier territory (though I go on the occasional dinner where someone orders a magnum of some outrageously priced something or other. I drink it. I'm no snob. ;)

Now with caps!

Water.. paying for water...

Tipping Sacred Cows

Most of my family is from Burgundy (my mom lives in a very small rural village), so they are extreme foodies.   As far as the best chocolates, I can safely say that NOTHING I have ever tasted beats fresh, genuinely hand-made chocolates you can find in small specialized shops in Dole.   Dijon used to have what I considered the best chocolate makers in the world (they would throw out ALL the unsold chocolates at the end as they had "gone bad"), but they retired 3 years ago with no apprentice or children willing to takeover what is a very difficult art.  Most of these places are so hidden, you really have to be a local to know about them and they would be horrified at the thought of anyone not eating their chocolates the same day.

Same goes for other kinds of fresh food.  My aunt has had butchers refuse to sell her a cut of beef knowing she was going to wait a few days to cook it. "Come back the day you're are going to cook", even if it was Christmas Eve....   One thing that has declined over the years is the availability of good bread, which is increasingly harder to find, particularly good baguette and brioche.  Believe it or not, but I can also get better croissants here in San Francisco that I found in a month in Burgundy (for those here in SF, try Tartine).   Same goes for most types of bread.

Of course, living in San Francisco, I'm pretty much at ground zero for food and wine excess in the US.  We have 50 restaurants within a 5 minute walk of our house, with probably at least 20 ethnic varieties and ranging in price from less that $10/person to well over $100.  And there are some 3000 restaurants in SF for 800k people.

As far as wine goes, my current favorite is Pina, which is a very, very small Napa winery.  Their Wolf Cabernet is fantastic and I'm not really a wine snob, I know virtually nothing about wine.  It's so fantastic that you can only buy futures, as all current production is sold out.   Go to the winery and barrel taste if you get a chance.  Fantastic wine, but at $70/bottle for delivery in 2009, a bit to rich for me.  However, tasting it gives you a great benchmark for other wines, and the winery is not a hellish tourist trap, you taste the wine in the barn, with a dirt floor and everyone is dressed like they just came off the land (rubber boots, overalls and all).

One the extreme end of expense, a few of my friends love the French Laundry, which is $100-$200/person.  I think that for that price, anyone could buy enough quality ingredients to make a great meal and I refuse to pay that much for food, I don't care how highly it's rated.   Much more remarkable are places like Chez Panisse, which gets consistently rated as one of the best restaurants in the US, but has a prix-fix menu for $50-$65/person on weekdays.  Or Tu-Lan, a great Vietnamese place in the gritty part of downtown San Francisco with great food for less that $10.   One of my favorites in NYC was the Home Restaurant, which has since gotten so highly rated that the prices have gone through the roof.

Anyway, the aforementioned Burgundy chocolates usually cost 100 Euros for 500g and I have been known to buy over $100 in French cheese for dinner (OK, it does last a few days and I'm not buying it for status).  And I do love that Republic of Tea, even though it's really expensive.   So I guess I'm quite guilty of indulging in 'luxury foods'.

However, I also highly approve of very long meals with friends where good food and wine is consumed.  That is a very, very European thing and if more Americans do that, it should be encouraged, even if it takes luxury foods to do so.   In pursuit of that sort of thing, I had a 3 hour lunch on Monday and a two hour lunch today.   Slow food, enjoyed slowly with good company, much better that sitting in front of the TV with microwave food or eating fast-food at your desk for lunch.

Chris.