The answer is yes, I think, so long as you can set the question firmly within a context. The era matters, as does the place. If you lived in an isolated village in the Caucasus, where for millennia every family made its own wine from a modest backyard vineyard, an ideal wine would simply be the best example of the local product. As a Londoner in the age of Dickens, your ideal would surely be mellow, fully-mature, classed-growth Bordeaux, a luxury import. In the 1990’s and beyond, the ideal wine was perhaps in sharper focus than it had ever been: a 100 point score from an influential critic was (and often still is) enough to end any dispute. Then, there’s the market itself, which requires that wine with pretentions to the ideal must be among the world’s most sought-after and expensive.
In the 1970’s, Robert Mondavi proposed boldly fruity wines as the ideal and pegged California as the best place to produce them. More recently, a project known as The Pursuit of Balance sought to relocate the ideal in wine by emphasizing a close harmony of primary elements – fruit, acid and alcohol – with no component disproportionately represented.
While these concepts suggest that the ideal can be known by sensory means alone, other approaches seem largely theoretical. In this latter category are wines that are said to “communicate a sense of place,” those made with cultivars having a centuries-long residence in their respective regions, those fermented with ambient yeast populations, those made on small family properties where winemaking is just one aspect of a mixed farming enterprise. Package all these up and you have not a few people’s notion of an ideal wine, though precisely what effect these factors have is impossible to say with precision. What is clear, I think, is that an ideal wine is expected to pair comfortably not just with our short ribs, but with our values.
True, ideals can never be anything more than mental constructs, ever subject to renewal and remodeling. But erecting them is essential. We can neither live well nor drink well without them.
-Stephen Meuse
This Week in the Wine Corner . . .
THURSDAY NOVEMBER 29, 3-6 PM – FIRMLY WITHIN A CONTEXT
2017 Pasini San Giovanni, “Il Lugana” Lugana, $21.95
2015 Domaine de Quissat, “Cent Pour Cent” Vin de France, $19.95
2017 Podere Cellario, Langhe Nebbiolo, $25.95
FRIDAY NOVEMBER 30, 3-6 PM – CLOSE HARMONY
2015 Domaine des Huards “Romo” Cours Cheverny, $22.95
2015 La Vignereuse, “A la Santé des Mécréants” Gaillac, $23.95
2016 Monte Bernardi “Retromarcia” Chianti Classico, $24.95