Wine culture's current It Girl isn't new, but it marches to its own beat, charming a new generation of wine drinker in the process.

It used to be that Vin de France was easy to summarize as a category of wine: unremarkable, unmemorable, and frankly, uncool. Yet in recent years, they've become an unexpected, even unavoidable, fixture in the chaos of wines that pop up in my Instagram feed.

Think orange wines from the Alsace, pét-nats from the Bergerac, or newfangled PiWi wines made from grapes bred for disease resistance and sustainability. Many are recognizable by their eccentric, tongue-in-cheek labels. Cartoon critters like monkeys or pigs knocking back bottles are common. Others sport sassy names like Hurluberlu (French for "weirdo") and even provocations like, "You Fuck My Wine?!" Other than Vin de France written on the front or back label, many offer no other indication of brand or origin.

That's not to say that baller lineups of Champagne and Burgundy fail to pop up on social media anymore. Classic regions have never ceased to drive the market for fine wine. Yet the nerve center of wine culture, that magnetic force that draws in newer, younger generations of wine drinkers despite a global downturn in wine sales, marches to an entirely different beat.

Vin de France is a designation that sits squarely at the bottom of France's legally enforced wine hierarchy. Generally, these wins are run-of-the mill, produced in bulk, and inexpensively priced. They're labeled, simply, "wine of France," because they fall outside the established standards of more prestigious classifications regulated and controlled by regional bodies like the Indication Géographique Protégée (IGP) or Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée (AOC).

Twenty years ago, having to label a wine Vin de France, or Vin de Table (until 2010), would be like a death sentence for a quality wine producer, explains Nicolas Mestre, co-founder of the importer Williams Corner Wine. The designation was just a hair better than admitting total failure and abandoning one's wine to a distiller for repurposing. But over the last decade, the category has developed into a respectable safe haven for high-quality wines that exist in defiance of regional standards or regulations.

"It's not so much that the Vin de France category itself is interesting," says David Hinkle, the chief French wine officer of the importer, Skurnik Wines. "Rather, the most interesting Vin de France are wines that use the designation strategically because of some legal issue."

Indeed, the most compelling wines of the Vin de France share some version of a renegade origin story: Landmark wines rejected by an AOC due to petty bureaucratic technicalities. Innovative winemakers venturing to revive indigenous grapes or experimenting with varieties not sanctioned by the AOC. Natural wine producers who simply gave up on the AOC after repeated rejections for not conforming to a standard color, taste or style.

It's a classically French situation. "Think back to the Impressionists," says Mestre, referencing the Paris Salon dominated by classicists with little tolerance for the avant-garde. Artists outside the conventional art community "were considered nuts, so they found new ways to exist outside of the system," he explains. The safe havens they created, like the Salon des Refusés or the Salon des Indépendants functioned much like the Vin de France, as refuges for the radical and boundary breaking.