This has always been my philosophy:

Over all, wines that I would have poured down the drain rather than sip from a glass were improved by the cooking process, revealing qualities that were neutral at worst and delightful at best. On the other hand, wines of complexity and finesse were flattened by cooking — or, worse, concentrated by it, taking on big, cartoonish qualities that made them less than appetizing.

Despite the prevailing "wisdom," the notion that you shouldn't cook with a wine you wouldn't want to drink unheated never made that much sense to me. Good wines are made with careful attention to how they taste out of the bottle, and boiling simply has to break down a lot of the things that make it worth so much money. In my experience, a rich beef bourguignon made with a jug burgandy comes out fine, and leaves the fine cabernet to drink with it.

I'm no gourmand, but isn't this story along the lines of those stop-the-presses stories reporting findings that men like sex more than women?

Of course one uses the cheap stuff to cook with--if fine wine must be stored within a defined temperature range to maintain its' palatibility, then cooking with it would pretty much be ruining it, by definition, no?

If I'm making spaghetti sauce, I use a cheap dry red to add liquid if it reduces enough, or maybe some cheap extra dry vermouth-never the expensive wine.

I'm no gourmand, but isn't this story along the lines of those stop-the-presses stories reporting findings that men like sex more than women?

Nope. The conventional wisdom among the gourmet cooking community is (or at least has been) that if it isn't good enough to drink, it's not good enough to cook with.

One of the wineries we frequent will sometimes bottle their "didn't quite make it" wines for cooking & we've had very good luck cooking with those.

I believe it actually more along the lines of "If you do not think it is good enough to drink, it's not good enough to cook with. It basically just a question of taste and personal preference. Sort of like, "Write for your audience". Just as words are for the mind, cooking is a medium for expressing a taste idea or flavorful story for ones palate. Anyone can have a thoroughly entertaining and satisfying experience reading a Green Latern comic and a reduction of 3 Buck Chuck. However, If your having the Chef de Cuisine over then perhaps start looking up contacts in Bordeaux and brushing up on your Chaucer.

if it isn't good enough to drink, it's not good enough to cook with.

That's a little different (in my book) than not wasting good wine on cooking.

Well, what the maxim is trying to steer people away from is using the awful "cooking wines" sold in grocery stores. Also, avoiding fine wines for cooking is well known if you read serious cookbooks. Most fine wines (ones that need cellaring, e.g.) are very tannic and cooking will blow that way out of proportion. In contrast, most cheaper good-but-not-great wines (e.g. Spanish wine, Chilean wines, Aussie shiraz, etc.) are pretty fruit forward and make great cooking wines - the alcohol dissolves some of the food flavor compounds, the fruit adds flavor, etc. In fact, I'd bet that most of the flavor boost is from release of alcohol-soluble components - that's why vodka sauce was invented.