Kind of a rambling question, but one I’ve been thinking about here:
At roughly what price range would people say that whiskeys start to go from okay to good? How much for something really good? How much to get something mind-blowing, if that really exists? And at what point does a big increase in price not really add more than marginal improvements in quality, or just reflect its scarcity/prestige value?
I ask because with many other products (say, bigscreen TVs) I find you don’t really get a major bump-up in improvement in quality/features unless you jump really high above the standard consumer grade. Like, $20,000+ instead of $2,000.
I’ve dabbled in the $100-$200 range with brown liquors, but most of my typical purchases are in the $40-$80 range, because of the sheer volume of whisky-bourbon-scotch we go through in my household. A $150 bottle is going to disappear as quickly as a $50 one. And I’ve certainly not spent, say, $500-$1,000 on a single bottle.
Just wondering when things get noticeably better compared to, say, something around $120, or if some of the really high end connoisseurship is more driven by trendiness/status/curiosity than trying to find something truly better.
To use a chipping analogy: The jump for my home game from dice chips/slugged chips to vintage ASMs was a giant leap. Then, stepping up to THC Starburst solids was another big improvement, though the bump was less gigantic than them move from Walmart plastics. (I’ve never owned ceramics, but my limited experience with them is that they are kind of midway between the two.)
As I started to collect other, more specialized and spotted Paulsons (RHCs from The Chip Room, PCRs, etc.), these improved the game in smaller differences of degree, or just suited my own taste better, rather than representing an actual jump in raw quality. Once you have Paulsons, IMHO, you’ve made it 95% of the way to the top (I know TRK owners disagree). To make one more leap forward, I need to finish up design on several milling/custom inlay jobs.
After that, there would be little more for me to do as far as big upgrades unless I stumbled on some true grail set, like the actual chips from the Mayfair Club in NYC or something (whose value would be more in their history than actual chip quality). I might start collecting other chipsets, or make a creative mixed Vegas set—but these would likely be lateral shifts, not vertical ones.
Not sure if I’m expressing this clearly... But before I go and splurge on a bottle with a price more piece of nice lighting or furniture (which I could enjoy for years, not just a few weeks or months), I’m wondering if people can be honest and talk about whether the ultrafancy stuff is truly a cut above, or if it’s more about experimentation, noticing slight differences, bragging rights, etc.
