Word: frenchness
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...ways, saving these old manuscripts could imperil them further. In decades past only the hardy visited Timbuktu; the journey required days of travel up the malaria-infested Niger River. Today, dozens of tourists arrive several times a week on small commercial planes from Bamako, the capital of the former French colony. Timbuktu has become a favorite jumping-off point to explore the world's biggest desert. As the modern world rushes in, attitudes among Timbuktu's youth - the generation who will take custody of all those precious manuscripts - is changing fast. Entertainment in Timbuktu these days includes sitting under...
...Timbuktu's tourism trade. The driver who meets me at the tiny airport introduces himself (in perfect English) as "Jack - like Jack Bauer [from television's 24]." Crowds of Europeans converge every January to attend the musical Festival of the Desert in nearby Essakane. And young locals - armed with French and English - ply their trade as guides for adventure tour groups. (See pictures of the Festival au Desert in Mali...
...barring people from taking manuscripts out of the country. As international interest in the works grows, so too could their value on the world market, according to some experts. In 1979, Zouber, the President's counselor, bought 25 Timbuktu manuscripts from the daughter of a former French diplomat who had been stationed in Mali and had taken them with him when he left; Zouber tracked her down in Cannes and paid about $25,000 for the lot. "Now they're worth perhaps 10 times that amount," he says...
...took but a handful of small, yellow insects hitchhiking on an American grapevine imported around 1850 to change French wine forever. In the aftermath of the phylloxera blight, which devastated vineyards across the country, multitudes of native varietals were never replanted in favor of others more productive or disease-resistant. Since then, more still have been abandoned as French winemakers, like those the world over, began growing the likes of chardonnay and merlot to offer standardized global bouquets. Today, though, a few are seeking to rise above the glut, by bringing back the forgotten varietals of France's viticultural past...
...winemaker and author Robert Plageoles, French heritage like this offers a new road when winemakers need to pull away from the herd in order to survive. "Today, we've taken to using the same 30 or so varietals that can be grown in any viticultural region on the planet," says the historian of the Gaillac region's 2,000 years of ampelographic, or grape varietal, history. "If winemakers around the world keep competing with themselves, they will simply die off one after another." And why should they, he asks, when there are literally thousands of other options? "There...