Absinthe Returns in a Glass Half Full of Mystique and Misery

[7/4]

November 12, 2007

Connections

Absinthe Returns in a Glass Half Full of Mystique and Misery

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN, NYTimes

Dear reader! Should this column impress you as being more than usually lyrical, recalling perhaps the imagery and elegance of poetry by Baudelaire or Verlaine; should it seem a bit decadent, redolent of Oscar Wilde’s withering hauteur; should it have a touch of madness or perversity, combining, say, the tastes of Toulouse-Lautrec with the passions of van Gogh; should it simply sound direct and forceful and knowing like one of Ernest Hemingway’s characters; should it do any or all of that, let me credit something that each of these figures fervently paid tribute to: the green fairy, the green goddess, the green muse, the glaucous witch, the queen of poisons.

Absinthe.

For this column was conceived under the influence of a green-colored, high-proof herbal liquor that was illegal in the United States for more than 95 years. And not just here, for when that mini-Prohibition began in 1912, alarm bells were ringing all over Europe. In 1905 a Swiss man murdered his family after drinking absinthe, leading to the liquor’s banishment from that country, where it originated. The French thought they risked losing World War I to robust beer-drinking Germans because of the dissolute influence of absinthe, so it was banned in that nation as well.

The medical evidence was also damning. As early as 1879 The New York Times warned that absinthe “is much more perilous, as well as more deleterious, than any ordinary kind of liquor.” A 19th-century French doctor, who made a lifetime study of absinthism, chronicled its symptoms: “sudden delirium, epileptic attacks, vertigo, hallucinatory delirium.”

But recently this anise-flavored spirit has been seeping back into the mainstream. In 1994 a museum devoted to absinthe opened in Auvers-sur-Oise, outside Paris. With its limited availability and exotic reputation, the drink inspired cultish devotion. It tantalized with its promises of visionary consciousness, so elaborately celebrated by a century of artists and writers.

Now absinthe has been widely restored. The European Union gradually jettisoned a hodgepodge of bans and widened absinthe’s availability. And this year two brands of absinthe made according to traditional recipes have been legally imported to the United States.

Last spring a French brand, Lucid, made its debut here, using 19th-century distilling methods and replicating chemical analyses of pre-ban absinthe. A Swiss absinthe, Kübler. appeared on the American market a few weeks ago, using a 1863 family formula.

One reason legal barriers have fallen is that, as The New Yorker reported in 2006, the regulated chemical thujone, found in wormwood and once thought to have been the cause of absinthe’s lure and its dangers, did not show up in any significant quantities in analyses of historical absinthe. So these authentic replicas, despite containing wormwood, do not pose a legal challenge. And the alarmed pronouncements about absinthe made from the beginning of the Belle Époque have been proved groundless, which was decisive, a Kübler spokesman said, in swaying United States government regulators.

This still leaves open the reasons behind absinthe’s reputation as an intoxicating source of creativity and invention, a power that led Hemingway’s character Robert Jordan, in “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” to carry around a flask of this “opaque, bitter, tongue-numbing, brain-warming, stomach-warming, idea-changing liquid alchemy.” It also leaves unsettled the cause of what led absinthe to be attacked, as one 19th-century poet put it, “the Devil, made liquid.”

Wormwood might still account for some of absinthe’s effects. Pythagoras prescribed wormwood steeped in wine for labor pains. In the 17th century it was used to treat venereal disease, intestinal worms and, yes, drunkenness. By the 19th century absinthe was used by French soldiers fighting in Africa as an antiseptic, to ward off insects and to treat dysentery.

But once I sat down with bottles of Kübler, Lucid and some friends, the cause of absinthe’s reputation didn’t matter, nor did the absence, in these brands, of the pearly green color of legend. What I did find, along with flavors of anise, fennel, coriander, mint and other herbs, was something different in the liquid’s effect, a kind of relaxed alertness accompanying the lulling impact of alcohol.

But I may have also been intoxicated by the drink’s cultural heritage, some of which is surveyed in recent books like Jad Adams’s detailed study “Hideous Absinthe: A History of the Devil in a Bottle,” as well as Barnaby Conrad III’s “Absinthe: History in a Bottle” and Phil Baker’s “Book of Absinthe: A Cultural History.” (More information is available at Web sites like feeverte.net and oxygenee.com.)

Whatever the effects of heavy absinthe use, this was, almost from the start, never just another drink. It has a special place in the history of modern culture. Poems were written hailing the “green muse,” yet 19th-century writers like Alfred de Musset also fell prey to intoxication. At the Académie Française, where he was working on a dictionary, it was said that he “absinthes himself too often.”

Toulouse-Lautrec was so wedded to absinthe that he had a special cane made that hid a glass. He may have also introduced the drink to van Gogh, who threw himself into it with abandon. Aside from drinking the liquor, van Gogh painted it, and once threw a glass of it at Gauguin. Manet and Degas painted absinthe drinkers. So did Picasso. Munch drank it heavily and Strindberg fed his insanity with it. Verlaine felt enslaved to what he called “the green and terrible drink.”

But any dissolution that pockmarks this history is more attributable to alcoholism or madness than absinthe’s effects. It also seems that absinthe had a peculiar relationship to the birth of modernism, as if it distilled some aspect of the cultural revolution that began in the mid-19th century and came into its prime just as the drink was banned. Absinthe was the premier bohemian drink, as inseparable from the avant-garde of mid-19th-century Paris as was scorn the bourgeoisie. It played the role well; absinthe helped overturn that bourgeois world with seductive visions of another.

But even those who hailed absinthe saw unsettling shadows. Wilde explained: “After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see them as they are not. Finally you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.”

Absinthe’s effects suggested, it seems, an inherent instability to perception, as if mixing and distilling the shimmer of Impressionism, the nightmares of Expressionism and the skewed images of Surrealism. Van Gogh made a glass of absinthe vibrate with energy. And when Manet, Degas or Picasso painted absinthe drinkers, they appeared introspective, alienated, not because they have been drugged into oblivion, but because they have seen too much.

At least in imagery, then, absinthe reflected a certain view of modernity: A firm, reliable order weakens, giving way to bleak uncertainties. For some this was a danger. A children’s anti-absinthe poem taught that the drink undermined “love of country, courage and honor.” During the Dreyfus Affair in France in the 1890s, when the French right considered Jews a threat to the old order, absinthe was denounced as a “tool of the Jews.”

In tasting absinthe now, older associations with bohemian modernism still resonate. But the lucidity absinthe supposedly creates may not, history tells us, always be reassuring. Who can’t help but feel a bit of unsettling vertigo when sipping this drink that once filled Parisian cafes, even if that vertigo, which once produced allusive French poetry, now just inspires newspaper columns.

[MoGrubb]

I've been meaning to try that stuff for a long time. Next time I go for Johnnie Walker Imma agetting some absinthe!

[sal]

Tried it once. Never again. And I enjoy not being sober.

[Rooster_Ties]

The Wørd: Absinthetinence

I, (state your name), do hereby pledge to practice absinth-tinence by remaining absinth-tinent from Absinthe. Since Absinthe incidents in many instances induce incipient synthetic inspiration and sinister synthetic insistence on sin, I sincerely insist I will be absent from instances of Absinthe ingestion, this instant.

[MoGrubb]

I must be part Missiourin, ya gots to show me.

[7/4]

December 5, 2007

A Liquor of Legend Makes a Comeback

By PETE WELLS, NY Times

Lance Winters makes absinthe at the St. George Spirits distillery in Alameda, Calif.

EARLIER this year, when Lance Winters heard that absinthe was being sold in the United States again for the first time since 1912, he shrugged it off. Then he reconsidered. He’d spent 11 years perfecting an absinthe at St. George Spirits, the distillery where he works in Alameda, Calif., and considered it one of the best things he’d ever made. Why not sell it?

Over the past few months, he must have wished he’d stuck to his first instinct.

The division of the Treasury Department that approves alcohol packaging sent back his label seven times, he said. They thought it looked too much like the British pound note. They wondered why it was called Absinthe Verte when their lab analysis said the liquid inside was amber. Mostly, it seemed to him, they didn’t like the monkey.

“I had the image of a spider monkey beating on a skull with femur bones,” Mr. Winters said. But he said that the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau thought the label “implied that there are hallucinogenic, mind-altering or psychotropic qualities” to the product.

“I said, ‘You get all that just from looking at a monkey?’”

His frustration came to a sudden end last Wednesday, when he learned the agency had finally granted approval to his St. George Absinthe Verte, the first American-made absinthe on the market in almost a century.

Since the start of the year, at least four absinthes, including two from Europe and one from South America, have been cleared for sale. At the same time, hundred-year-old legends about its ties to murder and madness have been discredited. For years, absinthe’s chief appeal has been its shady reputation and contraband status. It was said to have caused artists like Van Gogh to hallucinate. Now that it is safe and legal, will anyone still drink it?

To find out, I tried the two absinthes on sale in New York along with an early sample of St. George Absinthe Verte. And I was astonished by how delicate, gentle and refreshing they were. Astonished in part because of my earlier run-ins with absinthe. There was the Portuguese stuff that looked like radiator fluid and tasted like a mouthful of copper. There was the Czech product that a friend smuggled past customs in a mouthwash bottle. I would have preferred the mouthwash.

Another European brand is “the color of reactor cooling fluid and there’s nothing natural about that,” said Mr. Winters, who would know. Before turning to alcohol as a full-time job, he worked as an engineer on a reactor on board a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.

Absinthe aficionados agree that a lot of absinthe isn’t very good.

“Before Hurricane Katrina destroyed a lot of my things, I had a very extensive collection of bad absinthe,” said T. A. Breaux, a former resident of New Orleans who designed one of the new absinthes, Lucid. Most of Mr. Breaux’s bad absinthe is modern, but the taste of absinthe has been problematic for centuries. The word comes from the Greek apsinthion, which means undrinkable. The essential ingredient in absinthe, a medicinal herb called grand wormwood, is profoundly bitter. How bitter?

“Ever take malaria pills?” Mr. Winters asked. “Ever bite into one?”

Mr. Winters had never tasted absinthe when he started making his own. Nor did he hope to sell it. He was just playing. “You know, give a boy a still,” he said. He worked from a recipe in a back issue of Scientific American, then adjusted the formula. “It was just a manic obsession with the ingredients that drove me to tweak the formula.”

After a few tries, Mr. Winters found that grand wormwood was best used in just the first step of absinthe making, when it is infused into grape brandy along with anise and fennel and then distilled, so its bitterness could be left behind in the still. In the second step, he infused a portion of what came out of the still with lemon balm, hyssop, tarragon and other botanicals, including a much less bitter cousin of grand wormwood. Finally this flavorful infusion is mixed back into the result of the first distillation.

Mr. Breaux, too, muffles the wormwood with fennel and anise. An environmental chemist with access to gas chromatography mass spectrometers, he had analyzed unopened samples of absinthe from before the ban.

“They are just beautiful pieces of craftsmanship,” he said. “They were artisanally made with the best herbs and there’s just no comparison between that and something that has green dye and ‘absinthe’ stamped on the bottle.” The two kinds have as much in common, he said, as “a good Bordeaux and a bottle of cheap wine that one buys in a roadside convenience store.”

That, more or less, is what I’d say about the difference between the absinthes I cut my teeth on and those produced by Mr. Breaux, Mr. Winters and the Kübler distillery in Switzerland.

I tried each straight (eye-opening, but not for everybody), and diluted with water. The sugar cube of legend is not needed with a skillfully made absinthe, which all of these were.

The Kübler Absinthe Supérieure ($56.99), at 53 percent alcohol, is the easiest to understand. Fans of Pernod and other absinthe substitutes will find the flavors familiar. But while Pernod speaks of anise, Kübler tastes like licorice. It says only one thing, but says it very pleasantly.

With Lucid ($67.99), things get more complicated. Mr. Breaux makes it in a French distillery based on his analysis of vintage absinthes. Besides a bracing dose of fresh anise and a back-of-the-tongue bitterness, on one tasting, I thought I detected asparagus. A second encounter was more minty. Both times, Lucid kept pulling me back in for a fourth, seventh, twelfth sip. It was alarmingly easy to imagine exploring it while a long afternoon slipped away.

St. George, which will cost around $75, is the most layered of the three. Mr. Winters has a history of capturing delicate aromas in a bottle (a vodka of his called Hangar One smells just like mandarin blossoms) and his Absinthe Verte is full of fresh green herbs. Anise and fennel make their scheduled appearance but hardly dominate.

While the United States may be in the throes of an absinthe renaissance, distillers suspect that new bottles will arrive slowly. Absinthe was banned in America in 1912 because of health concerns fanned by some of the same anti-alcohol forces who would later push through Prohibition. Due to a reorganization of the government’s food-safety bureaucracy, the ban was effectively lifted before World War II, although it took decades before anybody realized it.

One absinthe that will try to brave the regulators next year is a spirit distilled by Markus Lion in Germany for the performer Marilyn Manson. Called Mansinthe, it is “designed to please newbies as well as long-term absinthe lovers,” Mr. Lion said in an e-mail message.

Mr. Breaux has crafted several other absinthes that are sold in Europe, but he and his American importer, Viridian Spirits, are not ready to face the Tax and Trade Bureau again just yet.

“I’m trying to recover my sanity first,” said Mr. Breaux. “There’s this perception that we opened a door and now anybody can walk in. But it’s not like that. It’s like everything is still on probationary status.”

Jared Gurfein, who founded Viridian, agreed. “There’s no question they’re watching us,” he said. “I’m just not sure what they’re watching for. I hope it’s not for somebody to cut their ear off.”

[7/4]

Absinthe's Mind-Altering Mystery Solved

Charles Q. Choi

Special to LiveScience

LiveScience.com 2 hours, 3 minutes ago

An analysis of century-old bottles of absinthe - the kind once quaffed by the likes of van Gogh and Picasso to enhance their creativity - may end the controversy over what ingredient caused the green liqueur's supposed mind-altering effects .

The culprit seems plain and simple: The century-old absinthe contained about 70 percent alcohol, giving it a 140-proof kick. In comparison, most gins, vodkas and whiskeys are just 80- to 100-proof.

In recent years, the psychedelic nature of absinthe has been hotly debated. Absinthe was notorious among 19th-century and early 20th-century bohemian artists as "the Green Fairy" that expanded the mind. After it became infamous for madness and toxic side effects among drinkers, it was widely banned.

The modern scientific consensus is that absinthe's reputation could simply be traced back to alcoholism, or perhaps toxic compounds that leaked in during faulty distillation. Still, others have pointed at a chemical named thujone in wormwood, one of the herbs used to prepare absinthe and the one that gives the drink its green color. Thujone was blamed for "absinthe madness" and "absinthism," a collection of symptoms including hallucinations, facial tics, numbness and dementia.

Prior studies suggested that absinthe had only trace levels of thujone. But critics claimed that absinthe made before it got banned in France in 1915 had much higher levels of thujone than modern absinthe produced since 1988, when the European Union lifted the ban on making absinthe.

"Today it seems a substantial minority of consumers want these myths to be true, even if there is no empirical evidence that they are," said researcher Dirk Lachenmeier, a chemist with the Chemical and Veterinary Investigation Laboratory of Karlsruhe in Germany.

Lachenmeier and his colleagues analyzed 13 samples of absinthe from old, sealed bottles in France, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and the United States dated back to the early 1900s before the ban. After uncorking the bottles, they found relatively small concentrations of thujone in that absinthe, about the same as those in modern varieties.

Laboratory tests found no other compound that could explain absinthe's effects. "All things considered, nothing besides ethanol was found in the absinthes that was able to explain the syndrome of absinthism," Lachenmeier said. (Ethanol is a word for common drinking alcohol.)

The scientists are set to detail their findings in the May 14 issue of the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.