A former judoka from Bordeaux, Thibaud Boudignon trained under Philippe Charlopin in Burgundy before spending nearly ten years as cellar master at Domaine de la Soucherie in Anjou. In 2009 he began assembling his own estate on the chenin blanc and schist of Savennières, with the Clos de la Hutte at its heart, adding adjacent parcels over the years until the holdings read as a coherent map of the appellation's most coveted slopes, among them a rare plot of ungrafted, own-rooted vines that yields his Franc de Pied cuvée. He is a vigneron who lives in the vineyard: organic from his first vintage and certified in 2019, cropping well below the permitted maximum and running the estate as a closed ecosystem of rainwater recovery and homemade compost. In 2016 he completed a purpose-built gravity-flow cellar, where gently pressed juice settles without a pump before fermenting with indigenous yeasts and aging on its lees in large-format barrels up to 1,200 liters, never new oak, and the top sites are held back for extended élevage.

This comes from a tiny parcel at the very top of Clos de la Hutte, where the soil turns unusually sandy over schist bedrock and the ungrafted vines root directly into it. It is one of the rarest and most profound chenin blancs in the Loire, an unmediated line between plant and terroir. The winemaking is as spare as it gets: malolactic is blocked, and part of the aging happens in a temperature-stable glass globe.

What emerges is a wine of staggering purity and structure — cool-toned and chiseled, yet lifted with white peach, lemon oil, verbena, and crushed stone. The palate is cool and finely tensioned, with a long, saline finish that vibrates with energy. Made in painfully small quantities and, on its own roots, always at phylloxera's mercy, Franc de Pied offers a fleeting glimpse of something elemental: a wine that won't exist forever but will be remembered long after the bottle is gone.