Martine Saunier, who passed away in February after a short battle with cancer, was a pioneering importer who introduced American consumers to many of France’s greatest wineries. Many will remember Saunier for her role as an ambassador for the likes of Château Rayas, Henri Jayer, and Lalou Bize-Leroy; but she was also a fiercely independent entrepreneur, and a generous mentor whose loss will leave a void for many in the wine industry, young and old, both in the United States and abroad.
Saunier was born in Paris in 1934 to a family marked, like so many, by World War I. Her father, a wounded veteran, had lost two brothers to the fighting, and her mother’s family had been left impoverished. When conflict returned, the Sauniers fled the city, depositing Saunier with her aunt and uncle at their small farm in Collonges in the Mâconnais. There, she soon adapted to rural life, living in near-autarky, surrounded by gardens, rabbits, cows, orchards—and vineyards. The return to Paris in 1942, all rationing and aerial bombardment, made for a violent contrast.
The summer, however, was still spent at Collonges, and it was in 1945 that Saunier began to learn about the vintage. She often reminisced about the harvest ambience: pickers passing a shared bottle of wine from row to row while snacking on sausage and pâté; her uncle dismantling the cumbersome wooden press while cleaning and repairing wooden casks and vats. Later, in the balmy summer of 1947, she would experience intoxication for the first time, over-indulging in the new red wine of that remarkable year direct from the press—an excess she vowed, with remarkable success, never to repeat.
At 18, Saunier was packed off to London after a stint at an école de commerce, her father unreceptive to talk of the Beaux Arts. Various jobs followed, as a translator and in the airline industry, before she moved to California in 1964. But her affinity for wine, nurtured by those childhood experiences, endured.
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The seeds of an import business
The seeds of an import business were sown on a 1967 visit to Napa Valley, when André Tchelistcheff, the legendary winemaker at Beaulieu Vineyard, told her that she’d need to go to Burgundy if she wanted to get hold of real Pinot Noir. Disappointed by the offerings available in San Francisco—oxidized Santenay, as she told it, and adulterated Bourgogne Rouge—she partnered with German importer Chris Hillebrand to bring in French wines under his license, taking a commission.
Saunier’s first buying trip took place in May 1969. Purchasing a Volkswagen Bug in Antwerp, and accompanied by her mother, she toured the vineyards of France in pursuit of out-of-the-way gems, instinctively drawn to the most artisanal and authentic producers. The first was Vouvray’s elderly Léonard Douzilly, recommended by a friend of her father’s. Run to ground at a local café, Douzilly hobbled on a crutch to his small caveau, opening a mold-covered bottle of 1959. She ordered 300 bottles on the spot, with the directness that would characterize the rest of her career. (“When that girl ordered 300 bottles, I almost soiled myself,” Douzilly would later colorfully recall to a mutual friend.)
That inaugural visit also led her to Château Rayas, a defining moment in her career. Later, she would recall her first encounter with a reclusive Louis Reynaud, a diminutive gentleman clad in waistcoat, necktie, beret, and round spectacles. A tasting followed: Rayas 1959, then 1961. She ordered 300 bottles, at the princely sum of $2.50 per bottle; an order Reynaud accepted, to Saunier’s father’s consternation, from an unknown woman without references. The only hiccup was a delayed delivery, when Louis Reynaud decided to transvasage any bottles of the 1959 that had thrown a sediment.
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Saunier’s relationship would encompass three generations of Reynauds. Louis had never formally introduced her to his son, Jacques, a silent presence during their meetings; but it was he who took the helm in 1978. They gradually got to know each other over lunches at La Beaugravière, chef Guy Julien’s truffle-focused restaurant in Mondragon (Julien was outraged that Reynaud never once paid the bill). Saunier also began importing the wines being produced by Jacques’ nephew, Emmanuel, who had left the local cooperative and begun estate-bottling at the family’s Château des Tours. In 1997, when Jacques Reynaud died on his birthday, trying on shoes in Avignon, it was Emmanuel who took over stewardship of Rayas and Fonsalette.
A Burgundy legacy
But although the Rhône, the Loire, and other French regions would remain staples of the Saunier’s Wines portfolio—which soon grew into a successful standalone business in 1979—her legacy will always be inextricably linked with the wines of Burgundy. She introduced consumers to the wines of Henri Jayer with the 1972 vintage, profiting from the year’s lukewarm reception in the press to gain a toehold with his communal bottlings and a few cases of Vosne-Romanée premier cru Les Beaumonts. The wines’ immediate popularity paved the way to importing the whole range.
The 1978 vintage, a year Jayer considered something of a breakthrough in his career, was a particular turning point, with Henri visiting the East and West Coasts to present the wines. Saunier was wont to recount a memorable encounter at Greenblatt’s Deli on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, featuring a bottle of 1978 Richebourg so aromatic that it overpowered the ambient aromas of pastrami to seduce the ownership into a substantial purchase (much of which ended up in the cellar of Joe Smith of Capital Records). Henri and Saunier maintained an affectionate correspondence over the years, with one missive, a dedication in a book, reminding her that “the wines of Burgundy will always be the best in the world—on condition that they are made by a great winemaker.”
Saunier’s connection with Lalou Bize-Leroy began later, in 1986, initially a relationship of convenience. Bize-Leroy—whom she remembered as deeply impressive, but also mercurial and imperious—was dissatisfied with the warehousing offered by her then-importer. Saunier was able to arrange a more satisfactory solution, and promptly became Leroy’s new importer. When Bize-Leroy founded her own Domaine Leroy in 1988 and Domaine d’Auvenay a year later, Saunier took those on, too, importing some of the Burgundy’s most epoch-making wines to the United States.
Of course, an exhaustive list of all Saunier’s notable producers would be impossible. The underlying theme to her selections, however, was always authenticity. Digging out small, artisanal growers crafting deeply characterful, singular wines was her hallmark as an importer. In the process, Saunier reshaped how Americans understood French wine, turning obscure growers into household names.
In 2012, at the age of 73 and after a foray into film with A Year in Burgundy (followed by sequels in Champagne and Porto), Saunier sold her business to Gregory Castells, a French-born former head sommelier of Pétrus and The French Laundry who had become a good client. “I told her that I wanted to start an online wine business,” he recalls, “and she replied, ‘Why don’t you buy my business instead,’” another example of that trademark candor. Today, as her eponymous company continues to thrive, Saunier’s legacy endures not just in the bottles she championed but in the countless palates she educated and the growers she immortalized.
