I will never forget a review I read in the Sunday paper one sunny day in Paris, when I lived there as a student. Each week an overall top wine recommendation was made, as well as a top wine recommendation for under $7 a bottle. On this particular day, the inexpensive bottle was the overall top recommendation.

Two things struck me after reading this review. First, wine obviously did not need to be expensive to be fine. Second, if the top Paris critics knew this and wrote about it openly in the paper, prices for wine had to be based on something other than rational thinking.

Today I just read a similar story in the NYT.

HOW much do you want to spend on a bottle of wine? The intuitive answer, of course, is as little as possible. That stands to reason, except that the way people buy wine is anything but reasonable.

Substitute the word wine with security technology, and this story gets even more amusing.

For most consumers, wine-buying is an emotional issue. The restaurant industry has a longstanding belief that the lowest-priced wine on the list will never sell. Nobody wants to be seen as cheap. But the second-lowest-priced wine, that’s the one people will gobble up.

All buying is an emotional issue, no? We might tell ourselves we are making a highly informed decision, but information integrity is never perfect, and we never have unlimited time to decide. A waiter standing over the table, guests with thirsty stares, or executives impatiently waiting to report to the board, we usually rely on some kind of emotional compass to pull the trigger.

I don’t usually think of American wines as great values. Too often the producers try to imitate expensive wines using artifice — mediocre cabernet sauvignon flavored with oak chips, for example — rather than making more honest wines from lesser grapes.

That seems a bit emotional to me, but I suppose they have a point to their critique. It tells me to look for wines from smaller boutiques as they are more likely to work towards a higher standard (their own good taste, rather than an abstract notion of marketing). And, for what it’s worth, that is often also the best way to look for security vendors. If you want overpriced and only marginally palatable vintages, go with the big names. You won’t be disappointed, but you also won’t be impressed, and in many cases (pun not intended) with the big names you might not even be able to get the job done.