Is it not common place now? Even the cheapest frat party is sure to serve some form of beer. Alcohol itself isn't really the status symbol, but the quality/price/exclusivity of it. As with any product, your status will rise the longer your scotch has been aged, the better your beer tastes, and the rarity of the grapes your wine came from.

This has been going on for centuries. Pliny the Elder wrote extensively on wine in his Naturalis Historia in AD 77. His extensive descriptions make him out to be a first century wine snob. Later, his nephew Pliny the Younger recorded an interesting event in a [letter to Avitus](http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/ancient/pliny-letters.asp#GenPart II) (XIX). At a dinner, a friend served food "by degrees:" fancy dishes for him and his friends, lesser ones for his lesser friends, and scraps for the freedmen. Pliny boasted that that was cruel and that he instead served the same, cheap wine to all his guests, since they were to be entertained, not divided. Quality alcohol as a status marker is at least a 2000 year old phenomenon.