Obviously these things are not equivalent. The car you buy, the sweater you wear, and the wine you drink are a few of the many little things that make a person who they are - in a sense, they're the distinctions that comprise the very essence of culture. What is a person (when viewed through another's eyes) if not the product of the decisions they make? And what is knowing someone, if not having an understanding of how they reach their decisions?
Not all wine is created equal - that's just true. Like food, code, art, music, and math, it's a thing that becomes more appreciable with knowledge. A lot of people would be just as impressed by a+b=c as they would be by Euler's identity, the Zeta function, or e=mc^2: normal people don't go around talking about the beauty of math, and yet those that know about it are captivated by it. It's the same story with Lispers and "Maxwell's equations of software". Are they deluded? No. Is it completely subjective and worthless? No - there is real, objective awesomeness in these examples.
Wine is not math or Lisp, but it's also not 100% bullshit (probably more like 60%.) This article is just another "please be like me" appeal, and they're getting dull now. There's potentially a lot of joy to be had by liberating your tastebuds from the likes of Gallo. $5/btl wine is not great stuff - it was probably a grape less than a month ago, and when you take into account vineyard margin, distributor margin, retail margin, the bottle, labelling, taxes, and shipping, you find the actual liquid in the bottle was created for pennies. It's treated with additives, flavourings, and sugar to make it both palatable and consistent: the grape is but a substrate. Like pink slime. $5/btl wine is the 1990's McNugget of the booze world. Each and every bottle is a shrine to engineered mediocrity.