The fanciest and best wine I ever had was when I was in northern Italy, in an area that was more or less all vineyards making some pretty fancy wines. It came in a rinsed out coke bottle that I had brought. The people who worked making the wine didn't necessarily own the vineyards if you can believe it, and since crop yields vary a bit from year to year, until the fancy wine was actually bottled the owners didn't know exactly how much wine they technically had. So the people working at the vineyard - who I can guarantee knew A LOT more about wine than your wine snobs, some of them even held wine tastings for wine snob tourists for extra money - were perfectly happy to just fill up my empty coke bottle with wine that had yet to be bottled. This was the cheapest bottle of wine I've ever bought (5£), but if I had bought the exact same wine in one of the glass bottles it was supposed to go in, with the cork and the label, it would have been by far the most expensive (about 100-150£ I think).
The wine was nice. I can never really taste those things they promise on the bottle like "a hint of apricots and wet hay" anyway, so I wasn't bothered by my bottle just saying "coca cola", but I am pretty sure I could taste a fair hint of in a small way helping the people who had actually made the wine take back some surplus value from the owners of the winery.
The fanciest and best wine I ever had was when I was in northern Italy, in an area that was more or less all vineyards making some pretty fancy wines. It came in a rinsed out coke bottle that I had brought. The people who worked making the wine didn't necessarily own the vineyards if you can believe it, and since crop yields vary a bit from year to year, until the fancy wine was actually bottled the owners didn't know exactly how much wine they technically had. So the people working at the vineyard - who I can guarantee knew A LOT more about wine than your wine snobs, some of them even held wine tastings for wine snob tourists for extra money - were perfectly happy to just fill up my empty coke bottle with wine that had yet to be bottled. This was the cheapest bottle of wine I've ever bought (5£), but if I had bought the exact same wine in one of the glass bottles it was supposed to go in, with the cork and the label, it would have been by far the most expensive (about 100-150£ I think).
The wine was nice. I can never really taste those things they promise on the bottle like "a hint of apricots and wet hay" anyway, so I wasn't bothered by my bottle just saying "coca cola", but I am pretty sure I could taste a fair hint of in a small way helping the people who had actually made the wine take back some surplus value from the owners of the winery.