Succulents Botanical Gardens Golden Gate Park Sunday February 8th - Where we'll be next Tuesday on tour.
By Esther Mobley, Senior Wine Critic Feb 9, 2025 - San Francisco Chronicle
Martine Saunier, a pioneering importer who introduced Americans to some of the greatest wines of France, died on Sunday of lung cancer. She was 91.
Through her Marin County business, Martine’s Wines, Saunier was the first woman to bring Burgundy wines into the U.S. She discovered producers like Burgundy’s Henri Jayer, Maison Leroy and, in the Rhone Valley, Chateau Rayas — French estates that were little-known at the time but are now, thanks in large part to Saunier’s advocacy, considered among the world’s best.
“She would discover something, and it was on instinct,” said her close friend Debbie Zachareas, co-owner of Ferry Plaza Wine Merchant. “She had an incredible talent. She was the one who would pick out these wines, bring them back and find people to buy them.”
That was an especially notable achievement for a woman in the 1960s and ’70s. “Martine was the only woman in the game back then. It was a man’s world, and she had to be aggressive,” said Greg Castells, a longtime friend who bought Martine’s Wines from Saunier in 2012. When she was convincing French vintners like Henri Jayer and Rayas’ Louis Reynaud to let her sell their wines, “it was the first time those guys had seen a woman in business,” Castells said. “They’d never sold wine to a woman before. But she had guts.”
Although many of the wines she sold seemed audaciously expensive when she started out, Saunier’s belief in their potential was unwavering. She could be disarmingly direct, never hesitating to ask for what she wanted or offer criticism when she felt it was warranted. “A lot of people, and rightfully so, saw her as larger than life, an iconic wine woman, and sometimes intimidating and forceful,” said Zachareas.
She was herself intimidated by Saunier when they first met in 1991, when Zachareas was selling wines at Ashbury Market and Saunier wanted her to carry her imports. “She’d find wine retailers and restaurants and storm into their stores and say, ‘You need to taste this,’” Zachareas said.
She became a towering icon in the Bay Area’s food and wine world, and Sunday lunch at her San Rafael home — where her table sat only eight people — was a coveted invitation. A stylish, trim woman with a closet full of Armani, she brought, along with her wines, a quintessentially French sense of taste and refinement to the Bay Area.
Martine Saunier, who introduced America to Burgundy wine, dies at 91
Greg