Absinthe

Wired 13.11: The Mystery of the Green Menace
Raised in New Orleans, a city once dubbed the Absinthe Capital of the World, Breaux has long been fascinated with the drink. Absinthe is a 140-proof green liqueur made from herbs like fennel, anise, and the exceptionally bitter leaves of Artemisia absinthium. That last ingredient, also known as wormwood, gives the drink its name - and its sinister reputation. For a century, absinthe has been demonized and outlawed, based on the belief that it leads to absinthism - far worse than mere alcoholism. Drinking it supposedly causes epilepsy and "criminal dementia."
Breaux has made understanding the drink his life's work. He has pored over hundred-year-old texts, few of them in English. He has corresponded with other amateur liquor historians. The more he's learned, the more he's felt compelled to use his knowledge of chemistry to crack the absinthe code, figure out exactly what's in it, puncture the myths surrounding it - and maybe even drink a glass or two.

I've tried this once, or something from the former Czechoslovakia purporting to be absinthe, at a friends house. We drank about 2 glasses, and while my head did start to spin, I don't think it was from the wormwood.

I would really like to try it again

Absinthe was first distilled in 1792 in Switzerland, where it was marketed as a medicinal elixir, a cure for stomach ailments. High concentrations of chlorophyll gave it a rich olive color. In the 19th century, people began turning to the minty drink less for pains of the stomach than for pains of the soul. Absinthe came to be associated with artists and Moulin Rouge bohemians. Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Van Gogh, and Picasso were devotees. Toulouse-Lautrec carried some in a hollowed-out cane. Oscar Wilde wrote, "What difference is there between a glass of absinthe and a sunset?" Soon absinthe was the social lubricant of choice for a broad swath of Europeans - artists and otherwise. In 1874, the French sipped 700,000 liters of the stuff; by the turn of the century, consumption had shot up to 36 million liters, driven in part by a phylloxera infestation that had devastated the wine-grape harvest.

By the early 20th century, absinthe was becoming popular in America. It found a natural reception in New Orleans, where the bon temps were already rolling. Breaux's own great-grandparents were known to enjoy an occasional glass. But the drink was drawing fire for its thujone content. "It is truly madness in a bottle, and no habitual drinker can claim that he will not become a criminal," declared one politician. The anti-absinthe fervor climaxed in 1905, when Swiss farmer Jean Lanfray shot his pregnant wife and two daughters after downing two glasses. (Overlooked was what else Lanfray consumed that day: crème de menthe, cognac, seven glasses of wine, coffee with brandy, and another liter of wine.) By the end of World War I, the "green menace" was made illegal everywhere in western Europe except Spain. No reputable distillery still made it.

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Breaux wasn't the only one rediscovering the long-banned beverage. In Europe, food regulations adopted by the EU in 1988 had neglected to mention absinthe, and when they superseded national laws, the drink was effectively re-legalized. New distilleries were popping up all over Europe, selling what Breaux dismisses as "mouthwash and vodka in a bottle, with some aromatherapy oil." Absinthe had disappeared so completely for so long that no one knew how to make it anymore. Including Breaux, who continued trying to reverse engineer it in his lab.
The new absinthes became popular among hipsters, just as the drink had been 125 years before. But now the presence of thujone was a selling point. Marilyn Manson boasted of recording an album while "on" absinthe. Johnny Depp compared its effects to marijuana. "Drink too much," he said, "and you suddenly realize why Van Gogh cut off his ear."

This wasn't just idle celebrity conjecture. In a 1989 Scientific American article, an American biochemist named Wilfred Arnold hypothesized that Van Gogh's insanity (acute intermittent porphyria, he speculated) was caused by the thujone in absinthe. Based on the description of raw materials used to make the liqueur, Arnold calculated that the thujone content was a dangerous 250 parts per million. "I would advise not drinking it," he says.

Breaux rejects Arnold's methodology. "He didn't take the effects of the distillation process into account," Breaux says. "He made a WAG - a wild-assed guess." Breaux wanted to settle the thujone question once and for all. And he was uniquely positioned to do so. "Back when the original was around, they didn't have any decent analytical chemistry. And when Arnold performed his research, he didn't have any samples of the original liqueur. I have both," he says.

At the EASI lab, Breaux ran tests on the pre-ban absinthe samples, as well as on samples spiked with thujone (from the very bottle I had sniffed). This allowed him to isolate the toxic compound. He spent his free time studying the test results, and late one night in June 2000 he had his answer. "I was stunned. Everything that I had been told was complete nonsense." In the antique absinthes he had collected, the thujone content was an order of magnitude smaller than Arnold's predictions. In many instances, it was a homeopathically minuscule 5 parts per million.

Read a lot more about the science, preparation, discovery and history of absinthe here in the rest of the article.

Breaux apparently is supervising properly-made absinthe, somewhere in the Loire Valley town of Saumur, with the assistance of the Combier family. If I could find out how to buy a bottle, for a reasonable amount of money, I would. In my lifetime, I want to try all of the inebrients loved by my literary and musical heroes, at least once. In the case of absinthe, twice.