How's Your Drink?

ABSINTHE: FACT VS. FICTION

The large glass of absinthe sitting in front of the woman is clearly
not her first. It isn't just the slack, unfocused eyes that tell you:
Slumped against the banquette, her shoulders droop; listless arms
drift away under the plain zinc table; her legs are splayed forward so
that the shoes look like they might be on the wrong feet.

Edgar Degas's 1876 painting of Ellen Andree at a Paris cafe came to be
called "L'Absinthe." It's hardly an advertisement for the greenish liquor --
the picture is such a blunt statement of dissipation that when the painting
was sold at Christie's in 1892, the London auction crowd hissed it.
Absinthe, that Belle Epoque-making drink, was indulged by rich and poor
alike in France. But the artsy avant-garde most noisily embraced it.
Bohemian poets like Verlaine and Rimbaud, Impressionist painters such as Van
Gogh and Gauguin: All celebrated the drink as an aid to creativity. Absinthe
was "the green fairy," a muse in a bottle.

It also helped that it was cheap, so starving artists didn't have to
be thirsty artists, too. The false promise of absinthe inspiration has
long fueled the underground appeal of the drink -- not unlike the lure
of heroin to a generation of jazz musicians who assumed smack would
help them play like Charlie Parker. But others are attracted by the
self-destructiveness of it all -- Van Gogh hacked his ear off while
deep in his absinthe cups. And probably the biggest factor in the
enduring mystique has been absinthe's quasi-illicit status. Though it
is illegal to sell or import absinthe into the U.S., the drink is not
a controlled substance.

I asked a Drug Enforcement Agency spokeswoman about absinthe and she
said, with a laugh, "We don't have a dog in that fight." At issue is a
chemical found in wormwood -- thujone -- long thought to be the reason
for absinthe's reputation as a ticket to the asylum.

The chemical is banned under Food and Drug Administration regulations,
but FDA spokesman Mike Herndon says that his agency has no say in the
regulation of alcoholic beverages.

Yet ask the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms why it won't allow
absinthe into the U.S., and it says it is simply enforcing the FDA's
ban on thujone.

Is Thujone Dangerous?

Recent research suggests that the chemical cuts the brain's brake
lines, leading to runaway synapses.

But the amount of thujone in absinthe isn't nearly enough to account
for the lurid descriptions of "absinthism" common a century ago. "A
large drink of absinthe will produce insensibility, convulsions,
.trembling hands, arms and legs, intense thirst, tingling in the
ears, illusions of sight and hearing," an Agriculture Department
official told the New York Herald in 1907. If U.S. rules against
absinthe are obscure, the laws on the Continent have not been. France
banned the national drink in 1915 in an effort to sober up its
absinthe-besotted army. In 1910, Switzerland wrote an explicit
absinthe ban into its constitution after a farmer, violently drunk on
absinthe and other spirits, murdered his wife and children (including
an infant). For decades absinthe was fodder for constitutional law
classes in Switzerland -- the leading example of how their
constitution had become bogged down with specifics better suited to
statutes.

When Switzerland finally undid its ban (the change went into effect in
2004) it was because of an overhaul of the constitution, not any
political groundswell from absintheurs. Now that absinthe is legal in
Switzerland -- as it has been since 1998 in the European Union -- a
number of distilleries have taken it up. A Swiss diplomat recently
poured a glass of Kubler absinthe for me, and it was something of a
surprise.

I've never been a huge fan of pastis, the herbal liqueurs such as
Pernod and Ricard that filled in for absinthe when the original was
banned.

Absinthe always had the pronounced taste of anise, but the licorice
was balanced with the bitter wormwood.

Once the wormwood was banned, the anise monopolized the
flavor.

The Kubler absinthe finds that herbal balance again and presents a
credible representation of a mountain meadow. If drinking pastis is
like sucking on a licorice candy, then real absinthe is more akin to a
Ricola cough drop.

"How's Your Drink?" does not advocate lawlessness, even when the law
is obscure and unclear.

So unless you are traveling in Europe, try Absente, a newish absinthe
substitute that avoids licorice overkill.

The traditional French cafe style is to dribble cold water over a
sugar cube and into a glass of absinthe.

Plenty of classic cocktails call for a splash of absinthe, but very
few use it as the main spirit.

One is the Brunelle Cocktail. It is very simple, which given the
complexity of absinthe's herbal flavors is probably why it works:
equal parts absinthe and lemon juice with sugar to taste. Who knows
whether absinthe ever had the mind-altering characteristics so often
attributed to it (and so sought after by today's bohemian wannabes).
There was danger enough in the staggering alcohol content many
absinthes once had -- nearly twice that of gin or vodka.

Down a dozen 150-proof drinks a day and you hardly need wormwood to
come to ruin.

Degas, Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh and Picasso all depicted
absintheurs; and if the paintings are any indication, their subjects
were not happy drinkers.