They needed to establish why Joel protects Ellie. In the game you aren’t given a choice. She’s a forced escort prop. In the TV show characters have choices. Joel’s motivation was a truck battery. Cool, he got that left from Bill. Now why? This ep. Establishes why.

Since no one else has talked about wine:

Its a common misnomer that more expensive wine tastes better. In my experience (been working with wine for about 20 years) most newer or infrequent wine drinkers prefer cheaper, fruitier and sweeter tasting wine. More expensive wines tend to be aged in various types of barrels that alter the profile of the wine. They tend to be drier, oaky, and more secondary/tertiary flavor notes (ie wood, spice, vanilla, mushroom etc). Many inexperience wine drinkers do not have a refined enough palette to be able to pick out the complexity of many more expensive wines.