Word: midi
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...Frenchmen. The crux of France's wine problem is overproduction of poor, low-priced grades. Almost half of France's home-wine crop comes from le Midi méditerranéen, roughly the region between Marseille and the Pyrenees. It is cheap, tart wine, and much of it is mixed with Algerian wine and sold as vin rouge, which must be consumed quickly, or it will turn sour...
...Winegrowers. Two months ago. faced with a huge deficit, the government announced that it would cut down on its price-support purchases for alcohol. As a result, 50,000 Midi winegrowers struck and stopped shipping wine. The government put down the strike and promised reforms...
...enthusiastic reviewer, "reeks of garlic." He was describing an exhibition in Paris' Louvre of work by painters born in Provence (where garlic is even more popular than elsewhere in France). As a group, the paintings did give off a strong flavor: baroque, darkly passionate and hot as the Midi sun. The most famous of the lot were by Fragonard, Daumier and Cezanne. (In maturity they learned to blend garlic with more subtle spices, and rose above their baroque beginnings to highly individual achievements.) But the star of the Louvre's show was a lesser man, Adolphe Monticelli...
...argot they are les Bicots, but respectable Parisians call them les Algériens. After 1946, when the people of Algeria were granted full French citizenship, they began pouring into France at the rate of 30,000 a year. Arriving in Paris on the slow trains from the Midi, they drift with their bundles into the old, revolutionary districts of Belleville and Ménilmontant, where whole blocks now have the sound and smell of Algerian medinas. Only one in five of the Algerians in Paris has regular employment; the others live in the tradition of the Paris demimonde, vociferously...
...began to write his masterpiece, France Gastronomique, in 28 volumes. "When you're searching for good places to eat in provincial towns," wrote Curnonsky, "see the doctors, the cabdrivers and the priests. They're the ones who know how to eat." Five years later, when Paris Midi asked France's innkeepers, chefs and gourmets to pick a likely candidate for the title Prince of Gastronomes, their choice was immediate-Curnonsky, of course...