(FORTUNE Small Business) – Drinking wine is often fun, but buying it can be stressful. This occurred to me when my girlfriend, E, and I set out to pick a pair of "house wines." We wanted one white, one red, each cheap enough to buy by the case, drinkable immediately, flexible enough to go with lots of things, and good enough to serve to unexpected guests.

First, we called on the services of three experts in New Orleans, where we live: Tim McNally, organizer of an annual hoo-ha event called the New Orleans Wine and Food Experience; Jerry Henry, who teaches a winetasting course at a local college; and Ric Hopper, sales manager at Martin's, the most celebrated wine shop in town. With their guidance, I bought eight bottles of white and eight of red. We started out thinking in the $7-a-bottle range. Turned out there was a little price creep as my reporting progressed, some of it the result of one of my editors egging me on to at least entertain the possibility that I might buy a case of $100-a-bottle wine. The prices ranged from $5 to $95 per bottle.

It was Hopper, a specialist on Bordeaux, among other things, who led me to a couple of bottles at the high end. Hopper is an intriguing character. He's serious enough to photocopy for me some pages on each bottle's region (both Saint Julien) and vineyard of origin (Ducru-Beaucaillou and Gruaud Larose) from a Robert M. Parker guide. Yet he has a mercurial manner with customers. As he told one who needed reassurance after buying several cases of pricey stuff, "Hell, it's only wine!"

Next we gathered up 15 or so friends, some well versed in wine, others less so, and started pouring them glasses from bottles that E had redecorated with generic labels and new, fake names, such as Thought, Procedure, and Twelve. The result was a party chatter that became more surreal as the drinking picked up steam--"I've already tried Modify, can I get some Thought?"

After a few hours of drunken theorizing about which wine cost how much, we crammed everyone into the kitchen and had the grand unveiling. The biggest hits were a $7 Hopper pick called Lecture--I mean, Val Muzols Cotes-du-Ventoux, 1998--and the $6.30 La Vielle Ferme Grenache Blanc. Also well received was Leaping Lizard (that's the real name), an $11 1998 Napa Valley Merlot. Several people were impressed with Joseph Drouhin Meursault, which cost about $35.

The $95 bottles, however, got a more mixed reception. "Dry, with a cough medicine finish!" was one spirited assessment. E and I sampled each and liked them--but not enough to ever pay $95 a bottle. Anyway, no one picked those two out of the crowd. When the truth was revealed, however, there was a huge pile-on of guests wanting to give the high-end stuff a try. As I watched the scuffle for the last few drops, I thought of the moment earlier in the evening when a guest had simply handed me his half-finished glass of Twelve to be flung down the sink so he could fill up with something better. I had paused for a minute, then went ahead and watched what I figured to be about $15 worth of Chateau Gruaud Larose spiral down the drain. Hell, I thought to myself, it's only wine.