A lot depends on what's meant by "wine" and the price range involved.
I like port, for example. I usually have a bottle sitting in my apartment so that I can pour a glass after dinner and drink it while relaxing.
And even without an "educated palate" I -- and other people I've invited to blind-taste who knew less than I did about it -- can taste the difference between, say, a $30 bottle and a $100 bottle. It's not a subtle thing at all; it's a massive difference.
But that's not because of the price; the price reflects the manner of production and the actual quality of the product. The cheap bottle is a blend of wine from several different years, and possibly different producers, may have been just dumped in steel tanks after fermentation to await bottling, etc., while the more expensive stuff is often going to be from a single year and/or single producer, barrel-aged, and so on. This produces a large and obvious difference in the way it tastes.
Once you get into that tier of well-produced port, you won't see much in the way of big jumps in quality for paying more. The difference between, say, a $200 bottle and a $100 bottle is much less than between the $100 bottle and the $30 bottle, despite the larger price jump. At that point you're mostly hunting for particular years which were known to be good, and are expensive because of that plus their scarcity.
I like port, for example. I usually have a bottle sitting in my apartment so that I can pour a glass after dinner and drink it while relaxing.
And even without an "educated palate" I -- and other people I've invited to blind-taste who knew less than I did about it -- can taste the difference between, say, a $30 bottle and a $100 bottle. It's not a subtle thing at all; it's a massive difference.
But that's not because of the price; the price reflects the manner of production and the actual quality of the product. The cheap bottle is a blend of wine from several different years, and possibly different producers, may have been just dumped in steel tanks after fermentation to await bottling, etc., while the more expensive stuff is often going to be from a single year and/or single producer, barrel-aged, and so on. This produces a large and obvious difference in the way it tastes.
Once you get into that tier of well-produced port, you won't see much in the way of big jumps in quality for paying more. The difference between, say, a $200 bottle and a $100 bottle is much less than between the $100 bottle and the $30 bottle, despite the larger price jump. At that point you're mostly hunting for particular years which were known to be good, and are expensive because of that plus their scarcity.