The restrained pleasures of Savennières.

Too many wines these days are too eager to please. Like puppy dogs, they stick their adorable wet noses in your face and furiously lick you until your heart melts (or you toss them aside). Occasionally, it's nice to drink a more catlike wine—a wine that might rub up against your leg but otherwise keeps its distance, a wine that makes you chase it. When my taste buds are in need of some elusive pleasure, I often reach for a Savennières, a white wine from France's Loire Valley that is truly feline in its aloofness. Made from the protean Chenin Blanc grape, Savennières tend to be mineral-rich, gloriously austere wines that can last for ages. Many of them are also absurdly cheap relative to the quality they offer.

The Savennières appellation is in the Anjou-Saumur region of the Loire, near the city of Angers. Overall production is small: According to the Loire Valley Wine Bureau, only around 17,000 cases are produced annually.  (By way of comparison, Mouton-Rothschild produces 25,000 cases of its grand vin per annum—and that's just one Bordeaux château.) The appellation's limited output is a function both of its postage-stamp size—it has fewer than 130 hectares of vines—and the relatively low maximum yields that are permitted. It can reasonably be assumed that the wines get their piercing minerality from the dark schistous soil that blankets the vineyards.

Savennières was once among the most prized French wines. Louis XIV was apparently so smitten with a wine from the La Roche-aux-Moines vineyard that he decided to journey to Savennières to see for himself the source of this elixir; unfortunately, the royal coach got stuck in the mud en route and had to turn back. The same vineyard also produced what became a house wine in the court of the first Napoleon. However, the most celebrated Savennières comes from another vineyard, Clos de la Coulée-de-Serrant. Legendary 20^th-century French food writer Curnonsky, dubbed the Prince of Gastronomes, famously declared Coulée-de-Serrant to be one of the five great white wines of France, along with Château d'Yquem (the famous Bordeaux sweet wine), Montrachet (the grand cru Burgundy), Château Grillet (a wine from the Rhone Valley), and Château-Chalon (a wine from the Jura). Coulée-de-Serrant makes headlines for a different reason these days: Its current owner is Nicolas Joly, the godfather of biodynamic winemaking, an ultra-organic, quasi-mystical approach to viticulture that has won the adherence of acclaimed wineries on both sides of the Atlantic.

Thanks to Joly, Coulée-de-Serrant remains an iconic name in French viticulture, but the Savennières appellation as a whole no longer commands anything like the attention and respect that it enjoyed 50 and 100 years ago. Outside the Loire, the wines are largely ignored in France, and they don't fare any better elsewhere. Interestingly, the appellation's descent into obscurity more or less coincided with a radical change in the kind of wines it turned out. In the past, most Savennières were sweet or semisweet. Since the 1960s, however, the wines have generally been vinified dry. Could this explain their diminished popularity? Hard to say. There isn't much of a market these days for sweet wines, nor is there great demand for bracingly dry white wines. To drinkers accustomed to ebulliently fruity, abundantly oaked Chardonnays, the typical Savennières will taste like a mineral-and-acid bath. It doesn't help that the wines take years to reach full maturity and are, even then, pretty austere. Jacqueline Friedrich, an American writer residing in France and the author of A Wine and Food Guide to the Loire, describes Savennières as "the most cerebral wine in the world," and that's no asset in an era when consumers generally prefer the easy-sippin' stuff. It may just be that Savennières is not a wine suited to the times.