Well there's a big cultural angle that I'm not qualified to speak on so I'll stick to the economics of wine and beer because I have a better handle on that.

This isn't just "modern Western society." Wine as a luxury good alongside beer as a drink for commoners goes way back, way way WAY back straight past the Classical Age when wine was a common luxury good to ancient Egypt where the elite enjoyed imported Canaanite wine while workers received beer rations. Wine being the fancy drink has been a thing for a very log time. Why? Well there are some fundamental economic reasons.

First off, beer is made out of (mostly) barley and wine is made out of grapes. Barley farming is a lot less labor intensive than grape farming so, while farming techniques have changed and improved over the years, it's always been a constant that barley is cheaper than grapes and because of that wine has been more expensive. If something is more expensive then either it'll be a small niche market, nobody will buy it, or it'll be seen as superior by enough people for it to become a popular luxury product. The third is what happened to wine and here we are.

Also until people figured out that putting hops in beer kept the bacteria out without killing the necessary yeast beer was a terrible trade good while wine was an excellent trade good. Why? Well wine is stronger and more expensive (especially by volume) so you make more money transporting it, which is important in the past when transportation cost more. Also for a whole variety of reasons wine was less likely to spoil than beer and the last thing you wanted after shipping your beer for a month was a boat full of spoiled beer. Let's hit the reasons:

1. Wine is stronger than beer. Alcohol is a preservative and helps keep bacteria out. The more alcohol the less likely you get bacteria coming in to cause problems. Of course this isn't a guarantee, acetobacter can eat alcohol and make vinegar but it helps a lot.
2. Yeast has an easier time metabolizing (eating) fruit sugars than grain sugars. Yeast tears right through glucose and fructose but is a bit slower to eat maltose (the sugar in malted grain that you use to make beer which is chemically two glucose molecules stuck together and therefore that much more complex). The yeast going to town on the fruit juice gives the bacteria that spoils wine/beer that much less of a window even if that difference can be a bit marginal.
3. Fruit juice is more fermentable than wort (the malted barley broth that beer is made out of). This means that if you just let the yeast do their thing they'll eat a higher percentage of the sugars in juice than in wort. This means that there'll be fewer leftovers for bacteria to eat in old school wine than in beer.
4. Yeast is naturally present in grape skin but any on barley will get killed off during mashing (mashing is stewing malted grain to get the sugars out) due to the heat. So if you're an ancient person who doesn't know how fermentation works and don't add much/any yeast you'll still have yeast in the juice but not the wort (unfermented beer).
5. Modern beer is almost always boiled for about an hour or which is necessary because you need heat the isomerize the hops acids (which means you've got to cook hops a LOT to get them to serve as a good preservative for your beer) but really old beer before hops were used often wasn't boiled or if it was not as much. Boiling the wort also makes proteins settle out as a nasty goop on the bottom of the brew pot that you can get rid off. If you don't boil the wort you have what is called raw ale which will have a lot of proteins in it which hurt stability and shorten shelf life.

All of this means that you're more likely to have beer spoil than wine in pre-modern conditions over the course of a trip. This made wine a more attractive export commodity and something expensive and foreign is easier to market as a luxury than something made by the local farmer down the road. It also made it possible for truly excellent wine to be shipped all over the place, which didn't happen with beer until much much later.

Of course a lot of these reasons stopped applying in the same way after people started putting hops in beer centuries and centuries ago but wine being a prestige drink goes back thousands and thousands of years and it's stayed that way.