After years of public relations work in South America and New York, Michele Foster planted her roots in the South of France and is building a business on the region’s celebrated wine, Rosé.

The 46-year-old Texan was born at a U.S. Air Force base in Denver, Colorado and moved with some regularity before finally landing in Austin, Texas after her structural engineer father left the service.

She was a pre-med major at the University of Texas but switched to Spanish to get a scholarship to study abroad for a semester each in Spain and Mexico. Her first taste of international travel took her to the University of Seville and then to the Monterrey, Mexico campus of the Autonmous University.

Her Spanish language skills and time spent abroad paid off in a great job in Mexico after she graduated from the University of Texas in 1991.

“My first job was in Mexico City with Burson-Marsteller, a global public relations and communications firm headquartered in New York City,” Foster said. “I was one of the early team members, which was great because they were expanding throughout Latin America. After a year and a half, they sent me to Buenos Aires to open an office and hire a managing director.”

At just 23, she was not considered for the managing director job, but a few years later in 1994 they gave her the opportunity to open and manage their Bogotá, Colombia office. But her experience in Latin America had gained the attention of the home office and she was sent to New York to specialize in the health care industry so she could return to Latin America after a few years to set up a regional practice.

“While in New York, I decided to go back to school for a graduate degree in finance, though, and that took me down a completely different career path,” she said.

After receiving her degree from New York University, Foster joined financial services giant Lehman Brothers in August of 2001, one month before terrorists struck the World Trade Center.

“I was in an adjacent building and after my tour in war-torn Colombia I knew what was happening,” she remembered. “I just told everyone that we were under attack and everyone needed to leave the building immediately.”

Thankfully, everyone followed her lead and survived America’s deadliest attack on its homeland.

After Lehman’s collapse and the start of the great recession, Foster decided to tough it out and build a book of clients in the face of the worst stock market since the depression in the early part of the 20th century.

“I worked my ass off and got hung up on hundreds of times, but I did build a book of clients that I sold before I decided to return to Mexico City in 2004 to tackle a business challenge,” she told us.

Her new job as chief executive officer was to turn around the failing public relations firm she had joined, which she did in three years. It was sold to Cohn & Wolfe, a large international communications firm, in 2007.

After the sale, Foster decided to move to Europe because most of her career had been spent in emerging markets and she wanted to round out her experience in a developed economy.