Wealth & Money Quote by William F. Buckley, Jr.

In Buckley’s world, good taste is supposed to look effortless, not purchased - and certainly not announced. His jab lands because it treats “very good wine” as the easiest form of sophistication: a credit-card flex masquerading as hospitality. Money can now brute-force the old social signals. The market has done what markets do best: democratize access while cheapening the meaning.

The sting is in “fatigue.” Buckley isn’t praising modesty; he’s diagnosing a kind of status exhaustion. If you’re serving the great bottle, you’re trying. You’re compensating. You’ve run out of fresher currency: stories, discernment, ease, the unteachable sense of what’s appropriate for the room. The truly secure host, in this logic, doesn’t need to prove the cellar; they can pour something merely good and still make the evening feel inevitable.

Context matters: Buckley came out of an American upper class that prized discrimination over display, where the right preferences were meant to read as inheritance - cultural, not just financial. Postwar affluence and a more liquid luxury economy made elite markers widely purchasable. Wine, once a niche of knowledge and connections, becomes a boutique commodity with scores, auctions, and labels that do the talking.

It’s also Buckley’s characteristic conservative wit: a defense of hierarchy disguised as etiquette advice. He’s not lamenting wine culture; he’s lamenting how conspicuous consumption reveals the anxious social climber - and how the old gatekeepers are tired of having to compete on price.