Perhaps you can pity me for not indulging in the taste of the $250 bottle. May I pity you for not experiencing the $1000 bottle, the $10,000 bottle, or the $100,000 bottle? Perhaps neither of us have lived. 

Or perhaps good wine doesn’t actually cost that much to produce, experts get fooled by cheap wine in blind tests, and there are better ways to use the $220 you have left over after buying a perfectly good bottle of wine.

At least, there’s a sensation in it. Be materialistic, if you want. Be rich, if you want. But you can’t make the taste of something last for longer than a very short while. Then, it’s gone. As long as there is a limited amount of supply, and there is a demand: there you go. Decacence, you say? Decadence is mining the Congo basin for Coltan and selling subsidized and crippled electronics so people buy more stuff of your DRM’d content.

So, if you would give me a choice between a glass of really good Brunello an a Kindle, I would go for the PRST2, and the Brunello. ;)

An enormous amount of work goes into making wine.  One fall day years ago, we drove down to the Columbia River and made a left up the gorge, till we arrived at a little winery sitting up in the hills with a view of the river.  Dozens of us picked grapes on those ten acres all day, grape juice running up our arms and dripping off our elbows, and we’d hardly made a dent in the crop.  By evening we were hungry, sticky and exhausted.  The vintners fed us well, let us drink our fill and bid us adieu.  The rest of the crop was brought in by hired pickers.  My respect for the long development of wine, and the patience of vintners everywhere went up a bit more that day.  What happened to the Brunello was a crying shame.

I’ll be sure to laugh uproariously when video games are banned.  Since I don’t play them, they have no business existing.

$250 is steep, but whatever…. its a craft product and the market sets the price.

But it sounds to me like the dude was a prick and pissed off a competitor or an employee…

I can’t fathom his comment not being about the $250/bottle price. Seriously doubt he would made the same comment about $3 or $25 wine.

I don’t really think he was making trenchant social commentary about luxury items. He just thinks wine is a waste of money, and went the additional ridiculous step of tying it to injustice.

He’s talking about being psyched about getting a “free” (due to a not-so-old model breaking) upgrade on a product that costs $70. A $250 bottle of wine is in a different dimension. It lasts like, what? 2-3 hours? It costs over 3 times as much. It’s a far far greater level of decadence.

By that logic, should access to the Internet and clean drinking water forfeit our grounds to criticize any amount of excess?

I can’t judge as to whether this was “real vandalism” or something else, but if it can be taken at face value, I can certainly empathize with the loss of this man’s work.