Word: wined
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...rockets and howitzer shells. By day, the city is ever more pathetic and dangerous. There are serious food shortages. Men dressed in army uniforms use M-79s to threaten shopkeepers, then take whatever they wish. Children who sell gasoline by the pint fight among themselves to pour their wine bottle's worth into the tank of a car for a few hundred riels, about 300. The homeless, the maimed, the wretched, the exhausted squat on the streets, huddle under makeshift canvas stalls...
...Without some economies and new taxes, the administration estimates that the state's $10.4 billion budget will be about $550 million in the red during the fiscal year that started last week. The new Governor insists, in his friendly way, that "the times of plenty, the days of wine and roses, are over...
...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...
Incensed by government inaction, some French peasants 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...
...these skirmishes were part of what Europeans call the Great Franco-Italian Wine War. The casus belli is a glut of gros rouge, the rough red wine that is the lifeblood of most Mediterraneans and a mainstay of France and Italy's agricultural economy. A bumper harvest last year helped to create a Common Market surplus of 2.6 billion gal. At the same time, French consumers have been cutting back at the rate of one bottle a head; consumption dropped from a total of 1.3 billion gal. in 1973 to a mere 1.2 billion in 1974. Complains one French...