A direct-detection Rayleigh-Mie Doppler lidar for measuring horizontal wind speed in the middle atmosphere has been deployed at Observatoire de Haute Provence (OHP) in southern France since 1993. After a recent upgrade, the instrument gained the capacity of wind profiling between 5 and 75 km altitude with high vertical and temporal resolution. The lidar comprises a monomode Nd:Yag laser emitting at 532 nm, three telescope assemblies, and a double-edge Fabry-Perot interferometer for detection of the Doppler shift in the backscattered light. In this article, we describe the instrument design, recap retrieval methodology and provide an updated error estimate for horizontal wind. The evaluation of the wind lidar performance is done using a series of twelve time-coordinated radiosoundings conducted at OHP. A point-by-point intercomparison shows a remarkably small average bias of 0.1 m/s between the lidar and the radiosonde wind profiles with a standard deviation of 2.2 m/s. We report examples of a weekly and an hourly observation series, reflecting various dynamical events in the middle atmosphere, such as a Sudden Stratospheric Warming event in January 2019 and an occurrence of a stationary gravity wave, generated by the flow over the Alps. A qualitative comparison between the wind profiles from the lidar and the ECMWF Integrated Forecast System is also discussed. Finally, we present an example of early validation of the ESA Aeolus space-borne wind lidar using its ground-based predecessor.