Are expensive wines really worth the money?

How many of us can say we really know anything about wine? Most people are probably familiar with the feeling you get when you stand there in front of the endless rows of bottles, with no idea what it is, you should really go to. We assume that expensive wines cost more for a basic and inexpensive wines should probably be avoided, but is there really any truth in this? We have tried cheap wines tasted fine, expensive, and those who have been terrible - not all of them in any way, but they exist and how could we know which ones to choose? 

It's like the theory that crystal wineglasses make wine taste better than ordinary glasses. It is true that it is definitely nicer to drink out of a crystal, they feel nice to hold and make that beautiful sound when you press them, but we have not seen any evidence that it has no effect on the taste of the drink. An unpleasant wine tastes nasty what you drink from it - just think of the familiar grimace on people's faces when they take a sip of their posh festive Champagne flutes, just to be reminded that they have always hated Champagne and just drink it because it is what you should do. 

A real wine buff will tell you they can tell the vintage of a good wine, and the region where it was bottled purely from tasting it. But in the opening episode of BBC4 latest mini-documentary series titled (quite ingenious, we thought!) Wine, one interesting and quite amusing scenario happened. A group of professional wine experts got a taste of an unfamiliar bottle, and asked to guess the vintage. Most of the party found the place in the 1980s, with the exception of one French expert said the 1928th As it turned out it was from 1870, proving that they really do not have a key. 

So do factors such as age and vintage of a wine that really matter in the form of a wine quality? If even the world's most knowledgeable experts who can not see the difference it seems that no, probably not. Older wines are likely to become rarer, which may to some extent explain why they cost more, but we bet these experts could have bought a whole box good 1980 wines at the same price as a bottle from the 1800s would have cost. And in these credit crunch times do people really want to pay over the odds for fine wine when it is entirely possible they could get an equally good - or perhaps even nicer - the threshers for the tenner?