The answer — as is usual with these things — is that it depends. Such a judgment is possible, but only if we provide not just the kind of wine but a context.
The era matters, for example, 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, the ideal wine would simply be the best example of the local product. While, as a Londoner in the age of Dickens, your ideal would surely be mellow, fully-mature, classed-growth Bordeaux, then a luxury import and the more or less exclusive domain of the well-heeled.
In the 1970’s, Robert Mondavi proposed boldly fruity wines as the ideal, and pegged California as the best place to produce them. 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 is the current state of the auction market, which asserts that little more is required of a wine to have pretensions to the ideal than to be counted among the world’s most sought-after and costly.
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.” This involves a constellation of identifying marks, including but not limited to the use of cultivars having a centuries-long residence in their respective regions, musts fermented naturally with ambient yeast populations and no additives, all accomplished by smallish family-run properties where winemaking is just one aspect of a mixed farming enterprise.
Package all these elements up and you have not a few people’s notion of an ideal wine, though precisely what effects all this has on the sensory character of the finished wine is impossible to say with precision. It seems clear that an ideal wine is expected to pair comfortably not just with our short ribs, but with our values, too.
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.