The Vin de France category of wine production in France is the least regulated. Most wines in this category are every day wines, simple wines that are generally well made and easy drinking.
Sometimes however, you’ll find little gems sold in the Vin de France category – wines that are truly terroir driven, interesting, complex and wonderful.
How come?
Appellation wines (wines that comes from a specific geographic location like Vouvray, Chinon, Savennières for example) are very strictly controlled. Each appellation has its own ‘cahier des charges’ (rule book) and growers must abide by those rules or they’re not allowed to put the name of the appellation on the bottle.
Some growers ‘break the rules’. This is where is gets interesting. A top quality wine could be sold in the Vin de France category for all sorts of reasons:
The winemaker is using the wrong grape variety
The winery is not located within the appellation region
The winemaker wants the flexibility to do what he or she wants to do without restriction
The winemaker has made a wine that is not ‘typical’ of the appellation (orange wine for example)
The wine pictured below is in the Vin de France category because the winery is not located within the appellation and according to the cahier de charges for Vouvray, the vines must be grown and the wine made within the appellation boundaries.
It comes from a walled vineyard (a clos) just a five minute walk from our house here in Noizay. Noizay is the last village within the Vouvray appellation. It’s a top quality parcel that makes a beatiful dry Chenin blanc wine. You see the words Cuvée Parcellaire Monopole in the label. That means that there is one single owner of the parcel and that is La Taille aux Loups, a top producer in the Montlouis sur Loire appellation on the other side of the river Loire.
It can be hard to work these wines out but let price be an initial guide. A table wine will priced as such (anything from a euro to 3 euros or so here in France), a high quality wine in the Vin de France category will be priced accordingly so you can expect to pay around 20 euros plus for a wine like this.
You can expect to find a lot of natural wines sold as Vin de France. Sommeliers love them and small independent wine shops know all about them.
Next time you’re looking for something really interesting, ask about what they have in this category. You might be pleasantly surprised.
