My spouse works at an artisanal chocolate factory in Raleigh, NC[0]. From experience, there is a huge difference in quality between small batch chocolate bars and bonbons vs mass manufactured. Even with small batch, there's a difference between buying it in a store vs buying it fresh from the factory.
That said, I don't think that difference is worth an extra $290. Once you're over the $5-to-10 per bar mark, there's diminishing returns on quality (for me at least.) Anything over that and you're paying for the story and branding. A $7 single-origin fair trade bar tastes the same as a $300 one, and in both cases, they're probably sourcing from the same farmer.
The fact that it's possible to charge this much for certain food & drink is both embarrassing and fascinating to me.
On one hand, anyone who's spent the time to cultivate a preference can tell some bit of difference between "crappy" beer/wine/coffee/chocolate/etc. and "the good stuff". On the other hand, taste & smell in particular are so adjusted by expectation, visual presentation, and of course stories of bespoke products from old-world artisans.
But even if you're aware of all that, I'm the first to admit it's easy to get enveloped in the more "objective" ways to put food & drink on a magical pedestal (especially those with psychoactive properties like alcohol, caffeine, & other drugs). Learn how different hop varietals contribute different alpha-acid concentrations that affect the taste and smell of beer, or the flavor profile of coffee roasts, or the THC/CBD ratio of marijuana strains...
It's not that it's all bullshit, there's some truth there for sure, it's just interesting to me when I find myself geeking out about these things. I don't (think) I fall for stories behind products, but there are many ways humans essentially get lost in, for lack of a better word, the "magic" properties of substances we ingest.
I see it as a kind of glitch of the human mind that's both life-enriching and, sometimes, to the detriment of our wallets.
You have to remember that there’s a large group of people to whom $300 means little more than $5. That’s the target demographic for these products, and to them, there is no predicted risk in spending $300 on chocolate. In other words, they have no problem spending the money because there will be no pain if the product disappoints. The money just doesn’t matter.
Knowing that, you just have to figure out how to reach them with the promise of a novel, luxurious experience.
That’s actually a really small group and most of the people who buy ultra-luxury consumables are not in that group. Michelin star restaurants aren’t supported primarily by the ultra wealthy. Nor are niche luxuries like chocolate bars that cost hundreds of dollars.
There is really no predicted risk for anyone on a $300 chocolate bar. You spend the money and get a chocolate bar. If it’s the best chocolate bar in the world, great. If it’s junk, that sucks. Either way your $300 is gone.
I don't think comparing this to a high-end restaurant is fair.
For $300, I can get an incredible several-hours long meal in a fantastic space, with devoted, engaging service. I'll have a great experience, memories forever, and inspiration for my own cooking. My friends will want to hear all about it. It's practically a half-day vacation.
It's reasonable for people that aren't super wealthy to save a bit and splurge for an experience like that every now and then.
This is a fucking chocolate bar. If I tell me friends I spent $300 on a chocolate bar, they will think I'm a crazy person.
Especially since a 3-star restaurant is a $30 chocolate bar, not a $300 bar.
Maybe there are some restaurants for russian oligarchs and other people with bad taste and too much money, but unless you go crazy on the wine (which they keep around for just such guests) all the 2 and 3-star restaurants I've been to have been 10-25 times more expensive than mcDonalds,not 100-250 times.
Wine is tricky, the taste is complex,the experience depends so much on what you are or have been eating, temperature, the glass, and I suppose the ambience, and is a rather strong (upper-middle) class marker,so even so-so expensive wines are given much benefit of a doubt.
It’s a fair comparison because they’re both within equal reach.
I think a $300 candy bar is stupid, but it’s objectively got no less utility than a $300 meal. You could eat a meal of rice and beans with a $300 candy bar for dessert and from a health and satiety standpoint you’ve probably equaled the $300 meal. The difference is the subjective experience.
> That’s actually a really small group and most of the people who buy ultra-luxury consumables are not in that group. Michelin star restaurants aren’t supported primarily by the ultra wealthy. Nor are niche luxuries like chocolate bars that cost hundreds of dollars.
A really small group with a lot of money is still worth paying attention to. Think about it like this, you wouldn't want to miss giving them a chance to spend that money. As the article says "To’ak chocolates—requires good storytelling". At that point it is all about storytelling. If you're selling a phone case, they are not buying just a wooden phone case, they are buying a hand crafted and polished product that came from an ancient jungles of South America, it was blessed by the shamans, and painted with pigment from crushed beetles etc.
Rich people will often look for ways (not necessarily conspicuous) of asserting their status. Spending money of frivolities like these is giving them a chance to do so. Many will understand that maybe all those claims are mostly bullshit, but they'll still buy it. Maybe just to show it off to their friends, give it as a gift, or flash it around their poor relatives and remind them what they'll never be able to afford.
> Rich people will often look for ways (not necessarily conspicuous) of asserting their status.
The point is that non-rich do that, too. Most people buying luxuries are not ultra-rich. $300 dollar chocolate is not out of reach for the upper-middle class, or really even the regular middle class. It might be a dumb purchase, but you could realistically earn less than $50k/year and still buy a bar of this.
I would imagine that my peers make up a much larger portion of To’ak's clientele than Warren Buffet's peers.
But the poor dont buy these products for quality. They buy them to emulate the rich. So you dont market to the poor. You market to the rich and famous knowing that the poor will follow. Get the queen to be seen eating your pies and tomorrow they will be sold in every grocery store.
The trick is too keep your price just under what someone living paycheck to paycheck might decide to spend on a special occassion. 300 is right in the middle of that range, the sort of thing one might buy as a special present.
If they are spending 10K on brunch it was good foresight of their ancestors to park the loot in a trust fund, otherwise they would likely end up broke.
Some of them do end up broke. I met this junkie in Amsterdam, who claimed that he'd burned through his trust fund. And then supported his lifestyle as a heroin smuggler, using young trust-fund women as unwitting mules.
>nyone who's spent the time to cultivate a preference can tell some bit of difference between "crappy" beer/wine/coffee/chocolate/etc. and "the good stuff".
Maybe not. But people will pay for a story.
Charles Shaw wines (sold at Trader Joe's stores, and affectionately known as "Three Buck Chuck") has won numerous blind competitions over wines costing a hundred times more.
And the famous Stradivarius instruments, valued at north of $1,000,000 cannot easily be discerned from high-end modern violins. But the mystique of the brand, the imagery of these little singing cabinets scraped out of wood 200 years ago, continues to fuel the market.
People pay $60 for a single ice cube carved from a glacier. That 100,000 year old ice sure must be yummy.
That sort of "luxury" ice was refined and distilled down to a throwaway gag in "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt".
Kimmy asks a rich boyfriend to bring ice for a party, and he arrives carrying a hinged, dovetail-jointed wooden box, lined with velvet, containing ornate ice tongs and six perfect ice cubes. The only way it could possibly be funnier is if they were all perfect ice spheres.
I have a friend who makes high-end violin, &c, bows (think: five-figure price tags) who was recently at a conference of sorts for musicians, bow makers, and such.
An acquaintance of his was carrying a Stradivarius, on loan from some foundation or other which had it insured for a silly amount of money. The acquaintance played it during a performance at this event. To my friend's somewhat experienced ears, it actually sounded pretty flat (not poorly tuned, but rather dull), relative to so many of the other instruments he's heard. In telling me about this, he didn't seem particularly surprised by that.
It's anecdata, but it clearly supports the notion that people will pay mightily for a name and attendant reputation, over actual quality.
The classical world has created a tautological definition of violin quality - a good violin is one that sounds most like a Stradivarius. With modern luthiery techniques, it's not difficult to build a relatively inexpensive instrument that's brighter or darker or more powerful or has more complex overtones, but any "improvement" will be perceived as a deviation from that ideal. Blind tests of violins are remarkably rare, which I think is a largely deliberate decision.
I happened to see a YouTube blind-test of a flute, and the next to cheapest flute won.
But blind testing is also hard, maybe you need to listen or taste for days,not just a few minutes.
I suspect a lot of sugar and artificial flavours are added to products as people are reacting favourably in 30 second blind tests, but given a chance they would appreciate the nuances of less engineered products. The sugar and the esters are getting old fast.
appealing to people's pretentiousness and such is a fine art and many a marketing scheme has arisen to do just that. exclusivity by price is just one feature. at these price points you can go all out on ingredients as well as packaging. in many cases packaging itself has more effort put into it than the product.
I think it's that any experience is a combination of the senses and that most importantly of all thought is a sense.
A sense is anything that happen involuntarily. Gathering data from the environment.
Food is mostly nose/tongue senses but also very visual. The tongue also has touch. However stories also implant thoughts and is perhaps the most advanced form of making food taste good as eventually all non-thought sense BECOME thought.
Stories however are limited because they create thought only in the form of whatever language is used, say English. It is also the method of gauging quality. "That was great".
The highly personal experience must snap to pre-existing words. Subtlety and thus more exact and truer meaning requires combinations of different words. Say a poem.
Food itself falls prey to the consumerism feedback loop that creates experiences that try to titillate the senses more and more in an absolute way rather than through subtlety. Spicier and spicier food is an example. As is more and more violent TV.
There's nothing wrong with this persay. It's just that the hedonistic treadmill ratchets upwards and eventually you run out of stuff and end up so numbed to subtlety that the small but beautiful things are difficult to appreciate because you've dampened your resolution capabilities.
High-food has the same problem as high-art. It takes too much discipline to appreciate and no one has the time. We're all too busy trying to one up the world.
Food has a third dimension. As one food snob put it, the best meal he ever had was a can of baked beans in the army when he was really hungry. Five star meals are more about novelty than primal hunger, which is rather limiting.
That's a good point. I wasn't thinking about thought in that way, but I think you're right.
I still put thought in a different realm since (at least for the cases where the price tag is bullshit) informed thoughts have the potential to counteract a purely sensory illusion... A different realm, but definitely an overlapping one.
I agree with much of what you’ve written, with a caveat about spicy food. I’m fact the vanilloid receptors which capsaicin binds to is damaged over time by exposure to spice. In other words the more spicy food you eat, the less sensitive you will be to spice on a physical level. Where spicy food is concerned, it’s more like opiate addicts requiring higher doses; it is a form of acquired tolerance, albeit on the tongue rather than in the brain.
It's the same with almost any product. Take cars for example: you have to pay thousands of dollars more to get a higher trim, which only has a different design and 1-2 options that are really useful.
If you like chocolate, too, there is a charming company called Chocosphere: http://chocophere.com that sells a pretty wide variety of bars and also has subscription options. Their website is a bit 2005, but the product is good.
It's been a long day and I don't know why I even clicked the link. But, after doing so, I wanted to mention that I really like the website. Whoever made it did a good job. It's probably as informative and easy-to-use as a site like that would ever need to be without being filled with useless, time-wasting fluff. Like I said, I've had quite a day and figured I'd end it by saying something positive. Even if it's just to my screen.
So, I assume Videri does small batches, it's all about quality, and doesn't put the usual industrial crap in its products.
If that's so, I would love to buy chocolate from them. I only suggest to price the 3-pack lower than $20 (if a single is $7, a 3 pack should be closer to $16-$17).
What types of difference in quality do you see? I'm not a chocolate connoisseur but it is interesting. I do pay premiums for coffee and cigars though. :)
Ingredients and care in the roast are the big things. You can taste the difference between chocolate made with cane sugar vs corn syrup, or in how much oils or coagulants are mixed with the cocoa butter. You can feel that same difference in the texture. The origin of the bean plays a big part as well, same as with coffee. Cacao beans bring in all sorts of fruity, earthy, and other flavor notes, which a good chocolate maker can turn up or down depending on how they tweak the roasting process. Also, good chocolate should be shiny, and snap when you bend it, a signal of a good grinding and tempering process. Compare this to Hershey bars (even their dark bars) which have a dull finish and either bend or crumble. Like with coffee or beer (or cigars, I assume), it takes time and effort to refine your palate for chocolate.
I’ll note that I had an eye-opening moment regarding the flavor of different beans at the Tcho chocolate tour on the Embarcadero.
At the end of the tour they do a tasting of bars made from single-origin beans. With the only additives being varying amounts of milk and sugar, one bar tasted bright and citrusy, another was earthy and nutty, and another was rich and (for lack of a better term) “chocolatey”.
It makes total sense in retrospect, but I’d never considered how much the flavor of beans by themselves can make such a difference.
apologies if this is a silly question but you said "per bar" a few times. i just checked your spouse's shop and a bar is 1.4oz (38g). That is quite tiny and equals roughly USD18 per 100g. In Europe I am more used to people comparing the 100g price, bar price doesn't matter that much. Is it common to ignore the weight of the bar in such comparisons?
You can make your own chocolate.
Get some raw cacao beans, roast it in the oven, break the shells, grind it to a paste, adding as much sugar as you like. Not the same as a bar, texture-wise, but pretty damn good.
The first time I tried it was in Mexico at a chocolate workshop. The instructor got freshly roasted beans, ground it on a stone along with other ingredients that I got to pick - Sugar (common), pepper (uncommon), Star Anise (uncommon) and eat the buttery thick paste.
Is there a word for people who are extremely skeptical of expensive things? Maybe I'm just cheap, but my attitude is simple - unless you can show me an objective benefit, I ain't paying for it. When I see a "story" driving a product like the article mentions, I often react in total disbelief or outright disgust, it's something that quickly sends me to a competing product.
The audio industry is particularly bad with this kind of thing, only a few people actually looking at numbers and doing blind ABX tests.
I wonder if there’s a rule of thumb for pricing the ideal item. Like: double the cost of the cheapest equivalent and you have a good quality pair of boots.
For example: you can get cheap boots for $80, that will fall apart in a year. Double the cost: $160, and that might yield an okay pair of boots that would at least last 5 years. Etc.
I don't think boots are a good example because the most important quality is how well they fit, not how long they last. If the $80 boots fit perfectly and don't give you blisters then buy them even if you have to replace them every year. Since everyone's feet are different there's no real correlation between price and fit.
I'd guess 4x. When I think of a few examples (chocolate, mattress, jeans, knife, computer) that's about the multiple between the cheapest version and the one I'd be happy with.
A similar good thing to know is the price floor of goods. You can't really make a good bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon in the US for under $20. If you're under that, it's almost certainly not good. If you're way over that, you're probably beyond the point where you're paying for quality.
I was reading about jeans recently, it seems there are two grades of material used in most jeans so as long as you avoid the bottom end of the market you are OK, everything else is just branding.
Bean to bar seems like a profitable, growing niche. I have friends who produce very high quality truffles and have been toying around with the idea. Two interesting things I've learned is 1) how many newcomers there are to the bean to bar scene in the US and 2) how small the universe of serious chocolate producers (from a truffle perspective at least) actually is.
As someone who fancies good chocolate, I haven't really found an incredibly high correlation between cost/satisfaction past the 4 dollar per bar mark. The only real exception to that is exceptionally fresh chocolate that's been made only a few feet away from where I'm buying it, but there's nowhere like that local to me.
Like coffee, a lot of the flavor and smell are extremely volatile chemicals. (Not in the explosive sense lol.) They just evaporate into thin air in a small amount of time, which is one of the reasons they have such a strong smell. If you keep ground coffee sitting around for a few days, it's going to taste noticeably different for the same reason.
I've heard similar things about milling your own grains into flower before cooking with them. The flavor profile of anything you make with it will simply just be stronger.
I hypothesised the same, remembering the huge difference freshly ground coffee made, and got a flour grinder a little while back. I've only made a few batches, and I'm still tuning the recipe, but I have not been blown away by the flavour. I need to try different kinds of grain, and I guess I need to make a proper side-by-side comparison, but it certainly is nothing like coffee in flavour-difference.
The high price. The marketing that plays primarily on intangibles. It just all seems to be from a playbook that is well known in the wine world, and has Noka as a precedent in chocolate.
That said, I have no concrete evidence that they're frauds. For all I know, everything they say about their chocolate could be true (which, arguably, would be the best scam of them all; I just can't see a rational argument to be made for a $300 chocolate bar).
> From there, Toth suggests placing a square of chocolate into your mouth, breaking it into small pieces with your teeth, and letting it melt. No chewing.
This is some 'shaken but not stirred' nonsense. How do you break something into small pieces with your teeth without chewing?
It's not that hard. This isn't something invented by Toth but is rather just a standard part of chocolate tasting.
You don't need a $300 or even $10 chocolate bar to benefit from this technique - it brings out the flavors of a $3 Trader Joe's 85% cacao Colombian bar just as nicely.
Ours is 1.70 or so. Trader Joe's has a bad record for suddenly ceasing production of stuff I like, so I buy a few dozen bars at a time. There's a noticeable difference between the first bar of a purchase batch and the last a few months later -- less fruity glossy snap, but I also find it more "cocoa"ish.
It's impressive quality for the price. Lindt 90% is also good if you can get it for ~$2, noticeably more cocoa forward if you're into that.
You know what, I think I was recalling the price of a different bar they introduced more recently. The 85% Dark Chocolate Lover's Bar is still $2 here.
Yeah we're on the whole low carb thing and it's relatively low carb while being cheap and delicious, couple that with living a distance from TJs, we tend to stock up and then our lack of will power comes into play...
A buddy of mine has a theory that every great product needs a gimmick. It needs something that makes it seem like it stands apart from similar products.
Going to sell a pen? No! Sell a pen that appeals to someone's sense of a adventure, even if it (and the person buying it) will spend its entire life sitting on the desk at the office.
Chewing means mashing it up repeatedly until it becomes a fine paste. The guy means just break it up into large chunks and let them sit on your tongue until they dissolve, without further maceration.
Yeah, I don’t get the problem. He’s just trying to get across the point of chewing just a small amount, instead of mashing it into paste.
If you don’t think this makes a difference… even if you’re right, you’re wrong. As Serious Eats points out with their articles on Mexicoke[1] and eggs[2], our enjoyment of food is inextricably linked with our emotional perspective on where the food came from and how we’re eating it. The simple act of caring about how you chew a bar of chocolate actually increases your subjective enjoyment of it, even if a hypothetical double-blind experiment would show no discernible difference.
You could immediately follow that tasting with another bar for which you give exactly opposite instructions: macerate quickly, trying to expose as much of the chocolate’s surface area as possible in order to maximize the evaporation of volatile oils. I would wager heavily that the explicit difference in instruction and focus on a different aspect of the experience would heighten the taster’s appreciation of both bars.
To me the most interesting thing here is that there's a market for $300 chocolate bars.
Entrepreneurs are often reluctant to charge more for their products in the early days, and articles like this show that customer interest doesn't require low prices. If you can demonstrate value and differentation, people will pay more than you might expect. Sometimes much, much more.
As someone that once owned an artisan chocolate factory, based on what I can see, I can make and sell this chocolate for around $5-6 wholesale. Meaning if I can unload 30,000-50,000 bars to Safeway.
Before Hershey, chocolate was a luxury good. And of course modern chocolateries exist on a spectrum from gift for grandma to luxury item.
I mean I get where they’re going [edit: and they have a good story] but this is within an order of magnitude of what already exists so the setup is a little flat IMO.
atlasobscura.com seems to mostly be click bait and paid placement these days, and it consistently gets spammed to social media platforms. I wish there was a way to filter out certain news sources from the feed.
I really want to see an analysis of how they went from obscurity (no pun intended) to ubiquitous a few months ago. The site's been around for years, but it seems to have taken over my news feeds on multiple platforms overnight. I don't mind too much, but I'm sure there's something interesting going on there.
Reasonably priced chocolate by people that want to make a change and help the people harvesting get a fair share of the profit that come to mind are “Tony Chocolony”, “FairAfric” and “Madécasse”. I really like how the individual pieces of tony chocolony bars are very unequally devided...
Another article points to the fact that they also play the scarcity card and limit the supply per year. 574 bars, at $300 a piece actually limits their profits significantly (even if they do manage to sell all 574, after marketing and expenses- distribution, packaging)... just how much of a business is this? Is it worth it for the team behind To'ak? And wouldn't scaling the number of bars made, in time, diminish their value?
From how I see it, the long term strategy would have to be to develop the brand name, then sell more bars at a lower price, and then ALSO create an extra-premium bar at an even larger premium price. It all leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
Starting expensive and then expanding for the masses can sometimes be a better strategy than starting affordable and then adding premium options. For one thing, you can build more hype from “the company that used to make only stuff I couldn’t afford finally has something I can buy!” than “the company everyone is buying finally has a way for me to spend lots of money”.
Your dismissive tone is probably a little off base on this. By most accounts the swindler in question was exceptionally good at identifying subtleties in wines and did a good job of producing fake wines that were both palate pleasing and mimicked elements of the wine being counterfeited. Add to that the fact that most people don't buy a mid 20th century Bordeaux and just go home and slurp it, most of it sits for a long time before opening.
Sadly, they destroyed his counterfeits. I think they could've actually sold them (all his wine was sold off to compensate those he defrauded), I certainly would've been interested in a hosted tasting comparing some real rare wines to his counterfeits.
By most accounts the swindler in question was exceptionally good at identifying subtleties in wines and did a good job of producing fake wines that were both palate pleasing and mimicked elements of the wine being counterfeited.
If that can be done cheaply and fools experts, I would buy it.
did a good job of producing fake wines that were both palate
pleasing and mimicked elements of the wine being counterfeited.
The "Sour Grapes" documentary was a case study in vintage wine being more psychologically concerned with labels rather than actual delicate details in taste and nuance, as cheap wine was sufficient in quality to please nearly every one of the clients. Even many of the experts and brokers were satisfied with the cheap mixtures.
A joke I heard as a child had a salesman explaining that a jacket was made of wool from a rare breed of mountain sheep, hand spun by artisans in their homes, and then woven into this cloth. "It is a beautiful yarn." he finished.
"Yes," said the customer, "and you tell it so well too."
The said supreme quality products are made and marketed as such solely by people who understand the basic rich person need to have something to differentiate themselves from the economic classes lower than themselves. If there were no products, houses, cars, wines, restaurants, shoes, suits, hand bags, airline class, hotels, etc. that help a class to differentiate itself from the the lower one - what's the point of making money your only and sole objective in life?
I rarely eat chocolate. But I admit to having been curious when I found out that CNN travel guy Anthony Bourdain and his NY chef friend Eric Ripert came out with their Good and Evil bar.
Its made from rare Peruvian Pure Nacional dark chocolate. Despite what I thought was an outrageous price of $12.95 it sells out almost immediately. Perhaps it's a bargain after all?
It is all in the marketing like name brands and generics.
I cut chocolate out of my diet for health reasons. I used to buy it 50 percent off after each holiday but gave up on that as well. I'm trying Apple Sauce instead and other healthy alternatives. I am trying to give up soda as well.
The most expensive chocolate I've bought were $2 truffles. I like chocolate, but personally paying <$5 for a chocolate bar I can still get chocolate that, to me, seems really good.
I really feel that any article that quotes the founding story of a startup/company/product is just being plain lazy and it's an instant turn off for me.
if anyone is interested in a more thorough review of the bar and the various the aspects of aging and how they affect the flavor and aromas here's a link to our guide for premium chocolate
So in short, you sell it by flattering the supposed palette of the mark outrageously, exclusively price it, and include a backstory. It’s the the chocolate bar for people who want to know the name of the chicken they’re about to eat. It’s the candy for people who think that vodka tastes better out of a $200 bottle.
In short, status signaling people with more money than sense.
The article it self focuses quiet a lot on the mental framework required to create the value. The consumer has to endow the bar with value by creating a complicated mental image of the process of creating the product and then consuming it. It doesn't pretend to have value as purely a status symbol, it certainly wouldn't be able to do that without existing brand recognition.
My favorite example for this is Grey Goose Vodka vs Kirkland Vodka. They are the same place, made from the same water source, just one has a fancier label and sells for 3x as much because of it.
Also, can this bar ever be enjoyed by oneself, or is it really meant to be eaten publicly and shared and discussed? It seem to me that they are not even selling a product but a symbol and story that lets the consumer signal their good taste to others
I was a vodka skeptic, but my wife can consistently pick her favorite (Ketel One) out of a lineup in a blind tasting. Even I can tell the difference between, say, Ciroc and Smirnov. So there really are differences that matter, though I agree with you that at the high end it's more marketing than quality. (My wife and I both agree that, for example, Patron is really bad.)
Obchocolate: my favorite chocolate used to be Lindt Mocha. Now it's Dove Dark.
I agree with what you’re saying about vodka, and I think as with many products a real range of quality exists, but that all goes out the window when you reach “prestige pricing” points. So yeah, Ketel One is smooth and delicious, and good wine is rarely up for $5 a box. By the same token I’m skeptical that most $50 dollar wines are not on par with $500 wines.
In my experience, there are everyday wines ($15-30), very good wines that deserve some thought and a well paired meal ($50-150), and oenophile wines that are really, totally amazing, ($250+), but to enjoy the last category you need to know wines very well, and know exactly what you enjoy in a wine (or you'll be disappointed by buying the wrong one).
Plus, most bottles of wine that are $250+ have some age on them, so you're really paying a premium for provenance too. The same wine can sell for double the price if it's still in the crate, has original paperwork, and has a verifiable storage history in appropriate conditions.
This is key: more expensive != better. It just means that it happens to be something fairly rare that someone somewhere with more money than sense likes enough to be willing to pay a ridiculous amount for. That person doesn't have to be you.
This also applies to whiskey - and especially to "craft" operations that source their bourbon or (especially) rye from MGP and sell it at premium prices. Templeton even built their own little Potemkin still to try to convince tourists that they made their own whiskey. [0]
There's nothing wrong with independent bottlers and blending houses (that has a very long tradition in Scotland, for instance), and MGP does make a good product. Just don't try to BS the customers.
For rye, at least, a good tip-off that a rye whiskey is likely to be MGP is if it touts a mash bill of 95% rye. [1]
That said, I don't think that difference is worth an extra $290. Once you're over the $5-to-10 per bar mark, there's diminishing returns on quality (for me at least.) Anything over that and you're paying for the story and branding. A $7 single-origin fair trade bar tastes the same as a $300 one, and in both cases, they're probably sourcing from the same farmer.
[0] https://viderichocolatefactory.com/