Sampling Absinthe's Dubious Charms

By ERIC FELTEN
Wall Street Journal

For Robert Jordan, in Ernest Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls," absinthe is a bite of Proustian cake. All his memories of Paris "came back to him when he tasted that opaque, bitter, tongue-numbing, brain-warming, stomach-warming, idea-changing liquid alchemy." Not wanting to share any of his last bottle of the stuff, Jordan is glad that a gypsy he offers a cup to finds it repulsive: "It smells of anis but it is bitter as gall," says the gypsy. "It is better to be sick than have that medicine."

For the better part of a century, that medicine wasn't even on the market in most countries. Absinthe -- flavored with, among other things, wormwood -- gained a reputation as a toxic hallucinogen. In 1915 it was banned in France, the country that had embraced it all too enthusiastically, and soon absinthe was illegal in most Western countries. In the past decade, those prohibitions finally started to fall away, first in Europe and then, two years ago, in the U.S. The new rules allow real wormwood-flavored absinthes to be sold as long as they contain only small amounts of thujone, the wormwoody compound long thought to be responsible for any psychoactive qualities the old absinthes may have had. There's been a proliferation of absinthe brands hoping to snatch up drinkers curious about the liquor's transgressive mystique.

But even urban hipsters drawn to the mythology of the "green fairy" find the bitter herbal soup a bit much to swallow. Pernod, a century ago the dominant absinthe brand, was reformulated as a wormwood-free "pastis" when absinthe was banned. Now, Pernod has reintroduced an honest-to-goodness absinthe to its product line. But it isn't exactly flying off the shelves. "It's a new flavor profile for mainstream America," says Pernod's U.S. brand manager, Brian Eckert. When the company sponsors tastings, such as a string of recent events at Morton's steakhouses, "The reaction is often 'It's not as bad as I thought it would be.'" Not the most ringing of endorsements.

(More here.)