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.

Clos de la Hutte is where the whole estate began, the site Boudignon built everything else around: roughly 1.5 hectares on a slope in La Possonnière that a religious community worked long before it was his. It counts historically among the finest ground in Savennières, and he farms it with the openly stated aim of returning it to that first rank, in the company of Roche aux Moines and the Coulée de Serrant. The soils are schist, the exposure generous, and the old core of the parcel gives chenin blanc of unusual density and drive.

He holds malolactic off to protect the wine's tension. Powerful and slow to unfold, it is coiled tight in youth around quince, lemon, and white peach, with chamomile, crushed stone, and a saline thread that runs the length of a long finish. This is a wine to cellar.