Domaine du Petit Bondieu means "Little Good God," a name for the property whose meaning has been lost to time. On this site, the Pichet family has long cultivated only Cabernet Franc (though they later acquired a rare parcel of white grapes in Chinon), farmed organically in the heart of Bourgueil. The family stopped using chemicals in 1990 and became certified organic by 2010, long before it carried any marketing currency. Thomas took over from his father, Jean-Marc, and was named Hachette Vigneron of the Year in 2018, a recognition that confirmed what the property's own cadastre, unchanged since 1780, has long suggested: this tuffeau ground, the pale chalky stone Thomas would talk about for hours if you let him, has been worth the trouble for a very long time. That tuffeau shares the estate with a second terroir: the sandy gravel terraces yield forward, aromatic wines like Céleste, while the clay-tuffeau hillsides produce structured, tannic reds like Couplets, a wine whose vertical back to 2003 (tasted in caves that range from a four-foot hobbit door to cathedral-scaled halls) was as persuasive a case for Bourgueil's age-worthiness as we have encountered.