Thanks!
I reserve drinking wine to extremely special occasions, so I stick with wines that I know I love or were recommended by a trusted third party (I have a brother-in-law who's a wine geek/knows my tastes). As a result, the last two bottles I purchased were Mollydooker's Blue Eyed Boy (at $36 -- normally this runs $45, but for some reason the Costco in Ann Arbor, MI has it for an exceptionally low price) and Mollydooker's Carnival of Love (at ~$100). I wouldn't buy the latter again. Though it was great, paying $100 for a glass of wine is hard to stomach and I won't drink re-corked wine (no device I've tried is capable of preserving wine in a way that makes me want to drink it the next day).
To specifically answer: once per year, and I'm willing to spend up to $50 since it's such a rare indulgence. That said, a decade ago I could find wines that I enjoyed for around $15-$20 USD and purchased a bottle about twice a month.
(and yes, those are accurate numbers -- no need to multiply by 7 due to people normally under-reporting the amount that they drink)
Unless you're specifically investigating a niche market of (people who comment on hacker news) & (people who spend money on wine), it might be a good idea to hunt for wine industry statistics / market research.
Some arbitrary suggestions:
* "An Econometric Analysis of Wine Consumption in Australia" [1]:
> On average, over the 5 decades, consumers allocated about 5 percent of their income on alcohol with 3.3 percent to beer, 1 percent to wine and 0.7 percent to spirits. Within alcohol, for every dollar the Australians spent on alcohol, on average, he/she allocated 65 cents on beer, 20 cents on wine and the remaining 15 cents on spirits.
* "Consumer Insights" [2]:
> In developed wine markets, people drink wine because they want to enjoy it, not because of the health benefits they might get from it.
(ha!)
> People attach different values to wines in relation to the occasion they are faced with. However, consumers with stronger personalities are less subject to normative influences.
(ha ha!)
> There are different segments of consumers in the on-line environment, with different level of skills and trust towards this form of retailing. Convenience and the price comparisons are attractive, but people still don’t like the fact that wines cannot be tasted and they are worried about the security of the transactions. This may change, but recent research still finds risk an issue. Online purchasing represents about 5% of the total wine market in developed countries.
[1] https://www.adelaide.edu.au/wine-econ/events/2030workshop/pu...
[2] http://research.wineaustralia.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04...
