If you had around £100 to spend on an evening’s entertainment for two, what would it get you? It might stretch to a night at the cinema followed by a simple meal in a curry house or chain restaurant. Provided you go easy on the drinks, it may just cover a night’s clubbing and a taxi home. And depending on the teams, it might get you two seats high up in the stands at a Premier League game, plus a couple of substandard pints and a gristly half-time hot dog each, if you’re lucky.

In each of those cases, the chances of a truly memorable evening (the genuinely great film; the riveting 4-3 scoreline; the mind-altering DJ set and up-for-it crowd) are not, if we’re honest, all that great. More likely you’ll have forgotten all about the night’s events by the following week. And yet only the most unforgiving puritan would condemn you for splashing out on these inessential fripperies. Nobody would brand you a decadent snob or a fool.

Split that £100 with a mate on a bottle of wine, however, and you’d better be braced for sanctimony and ridicule. Never mind that those rare occasions when I have done just have provided at least as much pleasure, in their way, as the greatest films or football matches. To even contemplate spending so much on a bottle of wine is, for many, always going to be Bullingdon Club obscene.

It’s not just the price tag that gets people’s goat. It’s more that they can’t see how it translates into tangible differences in quality. People hear about the trophy-winning £5 Spanish red beating wines 10 times the price in taste tests. Or they skim-read a news story where experts can’t tell the difference between a £50 and a £5 bottle. And they sniff a bouquet of rat, with notes of emperor’s new clothes: the scent of a con perpetuated on credulous snobs.

As with all conspiracy theories, this is difficult to argue against. If you’ve never tried a wine over £20, or have done but been left thinking “meh”, you only have the word of an oenophile like me to go on that the differences can be profound. And it’s not easy to explain why a bottle of wine should ever cost more than £20, let alone as much as £100 or even £1,000.

Certainly, there is a very noticeable series of jumps in quality as you move through the gears from £5 to £20, part of which is down to the proportion of the bottle price spent on the wine itself, as opposed to duty and VAT, being so much higher. Other factors in pushing up the price of a bottle are directly attributable to expenditure by the winery. Sorting good grapes from bad, both before and after harvest, is expensive, not only because of the extra man-hours and costly equipment, but because you’re voluntarily losing some of your crop. Hand-picking rather than using a machine will also drive up the price, as will choosing a site on the kind of hard-to-work slope on which many of the world’s best vineyards are planted, or using high quality French oak barrels rather than putting oak staves or chips in a stainless steel tank.

Finally, there is the cost of the land itself. If you were lucky enough to find a slither of vineyard available in one of the best grand cru sites in, say, Burgundy or Champagne, the millions you’d have to pay for it would inevitably feed back into the price of your wine.

Beyond that, rarity, fashion and marketing come into the picture, and any correlation between price, cost to producer and quality seems far from linear. A £100 bottle will not cost five times more to produce than a £20 bottle. And not every £100 bottle will taste better (let alone five times better) than every £20 bottle.

But that doesn’t make every bottle over £20 a rip-off or every person who buys them a snob. Very few people are getting rich from a costly, precarious trade where the running joke is that the only way to make a small fortune is to start with a large one. And even if they were, if the wines they make are capable of bringing joy, why would their making a few quid be any more worse than my football or cinema ticket contributing to Leo Messi’s or Leo DiCaprio’s astronomical wages?

Of the most memorable wines I’ve drunk, very few have cost less than £20, and most were nudging towards £100 or more. The distinctions may have been fine – some fractional difference in length in that Jean Grivot burgundy, some elusive sense of harmony in that Vieux Château Certain Pomerol, some character or flavour specific to that Biondi Santi Brunello from that place, that year. But they added up to something sublime. And, while I wasn’t always footing the bill, for a very special evening’s entertainment, on a pound-per-minute of pleasure measure, I’d say they were pretty good value, too.

Six wines that are real value for money

Luca Roagna La Pira Barolo
Italy 2010 (from £66, bentleyswine.com; hedonism.co.uk; uncorked.co.uk)

Barolo was never cheap, but its popularity among wine collectors in recent years has pushed the big names deep into top burgundy and Bordeaux territory. Rising star Roagna is not quite at the price level of some, but the elusive, allusive qualities of this haunting, pure example of nebbiolo are as gorgeous as they come.

Domaine Patrick Jasmin
Côte-Rôtie, Rhône, France 2013 (£35, yapp.co.uk)

How to account for the price here? You could point to its origins in the small, coveted, steeply sloping Northern Rhône district of Côte-Rôtie, or the care, attention and talent of M Jasmin – or the irresistibly silky texture and mingling of classic cool-climate syrah peppery and floral notes and perfectly ripe red and black berries.

Charles Heidsieck Brut Réserve Champagne
France NV (from £34, Slurp.co.uk; rannochscott.co.uk; etonvintners.com)

Champagne’s price premium is due to equal parts clever marketing, land costs, the time and capital it takes to hold on to its wines as they age, and the world-beating quality of its best wines. In the regional context, Heidsieck is always good value; this superbly rich but penetrating non-vintage is a reliably gorgeous experience.

Marks & Spencer Old Vines Carignan
Maule, Chile 2013 (£12, M&S)

Chilean wine has always been good on value, if not the subtleties of true greatness. That’s changing fast in styles such as the deep, chewy, earthy red wines made from re-discovered old-vine carignan in the Maule Valley, a modern classic style that, for now at least, is still available at relatively ordinary prices.

Cayetano del Pino Palo Cortado
Jerez, Spain NV (£11.49, Waitrose)

Few wines are more expensive to make well than sherry. The vast stock-holdings of slowly maturing wine, and the expertise required to manage them, sucks up a lot of capital. Current fashions means they’re criminally under-rated however, which means, pound-for-pound, the level of complexity in this richly nutty elixir is very hard to beat.

Iona Sauvignon Blanc
Elgin, South Africa 2015 (from £10, thedrinkshop.com; dbmwines.co.uk; drinkmonger.com; ampsfinewines.co.uk)

Of all the jumps in quality as you rise up the price scale of wine, none is more noticeable than the one that takes you from the £6 average to around a tenner, as is amply demonstrated in this taut, electric sauvignon blanc from the lush cool-climate Elgin, with its verdant charm, racy acidity and effortless juiciness.