Honest question. Your example of the external conditions that enable the 34 year old wine to shine. How does that work with the wine? In other words, if I substitute the cheap modern wine that otherwise won in the blind taste test, what happens differently in the setting you describe?
I don't know how these wine comparisons are done, but it's tricky to set up comparisons.
A famous version of this was the "Pepsi challenge". It turns out that people preferred the taste of pepsi in the test conditions, but coke in other, longer testing conditions. So part of it is biochemical (e.g. the taste you experience on the first bite/sip of something is not the same as the 20th) but some is also mental. Your experience of the taste of something can change with the environment you sample it in.
Simple example; I used the whole day to prepare a strong wild boar stew and that will be a perfect pairing for a very strong wine, possibly old. If you bring a light wine of the year to that table it will get diluted on the strong flavors of the stew. We might have a good night but the wine won't shine.
It seems like you are saying that the wine's qualities and how they pair with the food are very important. I don't think anyone would disagree.
The question at hand is whether a cheap/expensive wine, of the same type, would matter in the boar stew example.
Personally, I have no reason to believe that a more expensive wine would only shine under these types of conditions. I also think it's a matter of subjective taste, and there is no arguing matters of taste ;).
From the non-oenophile POV, my objection is the pretension of objectivity. "This wine is better than the other one" is a subjective statement masquerading as an objective one.
If you're not drinking a specific wine every day so to speak, and are tasting the subsequent vintages of the wine every year, your pallet won't be able to tell the difference really.
That's how it is for most everyone, I think the disconnect is that the newbie isn't aware of that and make take the "expert's" opinion out of context or too serious. And the experts can be jerks too, but I think it's more people unfamiliar with wine seem to come into contact with the jerks first for some reason and wine gets a bad knock because of that.
