Why You Shouldn't Pay Top Dollar for Wine

For years, the wine we drink has been a mark of social status. If you can drop $300 on a bottle of Merlot at a fancy restaurant, you can bet that other customers will turn green with envy. But the experts say you should never pay top dollar for wine. In fact, you probably shouldn't order wine at all in restaurants and should avoid expensive wine shops when you need a few bottles to keep at the house. Instead, shop around for the best prices because those are often where the real value lies.

Most of the people who pay top dollar for wine are doing so because it looks prestigious. If you bring a $7 bottle of wine to a party, people might look at you funny, even if the wine doesn't taste any different from the $50 bottle your friend brought with her. Taste is rarely a factor when you discuss the "prestige" of a bottle of wine; instead, people judge wine based on its price and where it came from.

So when you pay top dollar for a bottle of wine, what exactly are you paying for? According to the experts, the price is based on where the grapes were grown because, when a customer sees a familiar place on the bottle, such as Napa Valley, he or she automatically assumes that the wine will be perfect. In reality, most of the best-tasting wines are found with grapes that are grown in remote areas of France and Germany. The grapes taste better and the wine is much cheaper, sometimes going down to $7 or $8 per bottle. Their wine doesn't sell as well because they aren't known, but the difference in taste is astounding.

Another reason why you should never pay top dollar for wine is because most of the most popular wines contain additives that aren't necessarily disclosed to the customer. Federal wine regulations require that wineries disclose the types of grapes used in the wine, but they don't have to indicate if additional flavors, alcohol or water are used. Some bottles contain less than 50% of what you think it contains -- grapes -- which is why you often see variances in the percentage of alcohol contained.