Word: midi
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Acquiring separate items that can be mixed and matched, dressed down or up, the American woman can create her own look for all hours and occasions (see box). American women will no longer accept the abrupt style changes that characterized fashion until the great midi debacle...
...state of revolt reigns in the south of France," warned Emmanuel Maffre-Bauge, president of the French Table Wine Association. "There are grapes of wrath in the Midi." Not only there. In the Mediterranean port of Sete, 30,000 irate French farmers rioted, protesting imports of Italian wine. In the Sicilian town of Marsala, schools were closed, anti-French demonstrations broke out in public squares, and local unions called for a general strike of the area's 20,000 workers. From Marseille to Perpignan near the Spanish border, French growers, meanwhile, set up roadblocks of burning tires to halt...
...occupied the Cathedral of St. Pierre in Montpellier and hoisted a separatist flag, consisting of a cross on a wine red field. A group of French commandos broke into warehouses in Marseille and destroyed 450,000 gal. of Italian wine. Countless other barrels were sloshed into the Canal du Midi at Béziers, in a Gallic version of the Boston Tea Party...
According to a bill of particulars filed by four inspectors, the scandal began when Broker Bert bought up huge quantities of cheap red wine from the Midi in 1973, when prices for Bordeaux reds had soared in a speculative binge. He also bought quantities of Bordeaux whites, whose prices were not rising. One odd loophole in the government's appellation controlée regulations was that official papers for wines were marked by region of origin but not by color. Bert was accused of switching the papers for the two batches of wines by stamping blanc on the Midi...
Later in the trial, a government fraud inspector testified that the house of Cruse had also stretched real Bordeaux by mixing it with low-class Midi red. A truck driver who frequently drove from Bert's warehouse to the Cruse cellars admitted that he had switched papers to disguise the origin of the cheap red Midi wine. Still another witness was a lawyer for le fisc (the French income tax office), who asked that the court fine the defendants $18 million for cheating the government...