At my fotolog and flickr yesterday I posted a picture of a bottle of wine. There is nothing particularly special about the bottle except for its price - ONE EURO
I drink most wine because its pleasing and cheap. We have some seriously good California Petite Syrah and some fairly good French reds sitting around for special occasions, but for everyday pleasure I'm as happy with the local plonk as anything else. It is rare that it is bad these days (once upon a time that was not the case but even the French have learned basic hygiene and quality control) and every now and then we find a chateau/year that is excellent and go back to buy a few cases. The big difference between these wines and the ones I used to drink in California is the price. Wine that I paid $10 or so a bottle in California costs about €5 here.
Indeed I have noticed that the lower grades of Appellation Controlé wine (e.g. our local Côtes de Provence) seem to be dropping in price. Thanks to California, Chile, Australia etc. providing competition, the French have a major wine lake and hence us residents of France have a patriotic duty to drink the stuff :)
The other reason for living in the south of France is the scenery. Now when men say "scenery" and "Riviera" they often think of topless babes sunning themselves on the beach and I would be lying if I said that I didn't enjoy that sort of "mobile scenery" as much as the next heterosexual male (although I do think that those whose birthday suits need ironing, as it were, might do the world a favour by covering up). However the mobile scenery is nothing compared to the fixed scenery, whether it is the islands and beaches, the perched villages, the mountains, the forests or the vinyards where they grow the grapes for my plonk. From where I live I can be almost anywhere on the coast from Toulon to Menton in under an hour of driving and yet I can also be a thousand meters up in about the same time or possibly less and in two hours I can be up in seriously alpine terrain. France is of course far less densely populated than the UK and it really shows. Even "oop noorth" in the UK it can be difficult to get be far from the madding crowd as it were, but in France, even on the trendy Riviera, its easy.