Henri wasn't always a winemaker. He spent his early career in corporate insurance and banking, of all things, before deciding that wasn't the life he wanted. Born in 1987 and raised in Brive, he walked away from the office job and went and earned a viticulture and oenology diploma through correspondence courses, finishing it up in 2020. That's not the usual path into wine, but it's clearly the one that stuck.
From there he did his real learning in the vineyard rather than the classroom. He trained under Jérôme Bressy at Domaine Gourt de Mautens in Rasteau, then spent time with Thierry Allemand in Cornas, who's about as respected a name as there is when it comes to farming carefully and staying out of the way in the cellar. Both of those growers are known for the same thing: serious discipline outside, restraint inside.
In the spring of 2021, Henri took over a small estate in Boudes, in the southern Auvergne, buying it from a well known local winemaker who'd worked the land before him. He made his very first vintage that same year. Boudes sits on old volcanic soil in the Massif Central, an area that doesn't get nearly the attention Burgundy or the Rhône does, but Henri's wines are quickly changing that.
He farms just over 10 hectares of Gamay, Pinot Noir, and Chardonnay on some genuinely steep volcanic slopes, converting the whole estate to organic practices from the moment he took it over. Everything ferments with native yeasts, and the wines go unfined and unfiltered. He vinifies each plot and each variety separately, almost always with whole bunches, and he's cut back on sulfur use vintage after vintage.
What we like most is that he refuses to be boxed in by any label. Henri's own words are something like: he's neither natural nor conventional, and he doesn't want a cellar philosophy to matter more than the actual place the grapes came from. So instead of chasing a trend, he's just trying to get the volcanic hillsides around his home into the glass, as honestly as he can.
Honestly, once you taste one of his Gamays you'll get it immediately. There's a real sense of place in there, something a little wilder and more mineral than what you'd expect out of a young natural producer. People who've been watching Auvergne closely will tell you Henri's one of the names putting the region back on the map.
We carry his wines because he's exactly the kind of producer we want to be pouring: someone who left a totally different career behind, trained with the right people, and now farms with real conviction rather than just following a formula. Come try a bottle and see for yourself.