When eating a dish, I can usually identify the ingredients and spices by flavour, but different wines taste more or less the same to me. Some taste different, but I can't say that they taste significantly better than others. Spending $50 more on the food in a restaurant is going to make an enormously bigger difference than spending $50 more on wine. In fact, I find that not drinking wine at all usually makes for a better experience if the food is good, because the super strong flavour of wine destroys your ability to discern flavours on the next bite. Not all that different from putting hot sauce on all your food, in fact.
I strongly agree with what you're saying here and having been thinking along similar lines while browsing this thread. Taste is an important factor in food appreciation and one that most people already have and can develop further, to real value (including health benefits) in eating. It often reflects the quality and freshness of the ingredients (and thus nutritional value), as long as the cook also has some skill and hasn't 'ruined' those ingredients in the finished dish. Taste with wine simply doesn't have the same richness and usefulness, beyond indicating when a wine is 'off' or has been too cheaply/chemically processed, etc.
