I have one of those price sticker things in my house and I like to sticker my bargain basement $10 or less wine bottles with prices like $44.00 and $60.00 and when I have company over, I put these bottles on the table. I ensure I stay away from popular wines that my guests might recognize. They always say that the wine was fantastic.
Interestingly, this past Thanksgiving I bought a bottle of $25 red wine of French burgundy instead of the usual $10 bottle, thinking I'd splurge a little this year ... (yes, we're OK with French wine again:) ... anyway, we didn't finish the bottle, so there was some left over at Christmas. Upon tasting it at Christmas dinner, it was BLAAAHHHHHH (spiting it out) .... turned *really* sour, so poured the rest of it down the drain and opened up a new bottle of a 'different' $25 chardonnay, which we enjoyed (and finished off this time, wasn't going to let the same thing happen again! /laughs)
Anyway, the moral of this story is that the previous $10 red wines still held their own a month later, given the same circumstances, than than the 'splurged for' $25 bottle.
My wife and I belong to a small wine tasting group. None of us are sophisticated wine drinkers, but we have not found this to be the case. Often one of the low price wines is the highest rated wine. Many times a higher priced wine was disliked by almost all of us. Maybe we are just CHEAP?