“If you tasted an absinthe that was supposed to have been made a century or more ago, would you even know what to look for?” asks Evan Rail. It’s a key question driving his new book, “The Absinthe Forger: A True Story of Deception, Betrayal, and the World’s Most Dangerous Spirit,” which, along with the promised detective story, delivers a lively stand-alone seminar on temptation — as well as the culture and history of the much-maligned liquor and its reputation for causing madness and murder.
Nicknamed the Green Fairy for its most common hue, absinthe inspired Oscar Wilde, Vincent van Gogh, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Ernest Hemingway and many other authors and artists who found in it a liquid muse — not to mention a general public who just liked to drink. The traditional French way of consuming the distinctive concoction (flavored with anise, fennel and a type of wormwood called Artemisia absinthium) typically includes a ritual involving a specialized Art Nouveau-inspired accouterment: The drinker opens up absinthe’s flavors with a dribble of ice water poured over a sugar cube, perched on a slotted spoon atop the glass.
Absinthe was legally banned in the United States and parts of Europe for most of the 20th century, thanks to news media reports of lurid effects and unsound science concerning thujone, the chemical neurotoxin found in the wormwood. Pressure from rival winemakers (wanting a bigger share of drinkers) and temperance activists (who wanted zero drinkers) added fuel to the anti-absinthe fire.
As for absinthe’s reputation for inducing madness? Today’s science demonstrates that it likely wasn’t the wormwood that made people trip out or act up, but rather the spirit’s extremely high alcohol content. Still, many modern variations throttle back the thujone.
Hard-core fans of the edgy emerald spirit consider those bottles of the stuff made before France’s 1915 ban especially desirable. It’s these absintheurs and their tightly knit subculture (including, naturally, Facebook groups) — as well as input from modern distillers — that propel the narrative as Rail tries to contact the forger of the title, an alleged expert who was passing off modern mixtures as vintage spirits.
So what might be found in this book for those on the low end of the absinthe-appreciation spectrum — who, say, once sampled it after seeing “Moulin Rouge!” (in which the Green Fairy is played by Kylie Minogue) and are of the opinion that absinthe tastes like licorice-flavored mouthwash? Thankfully, “The Absinthe Forger” touches on much more than just an acquired taste for a ritualistically consumed spirit.
“I wanted to know more about the collector’s mentality, what drove people to buy old bottles for thousands of dollars, as well as to try to understand why Christian, whoever he was, had done what he had done,” Rail writes. The crimes of Christian — the London-based forger of the book’s title — are revealed early. Rail’s story is a larger one — that of the enthusiast’s dedication to learning the history and the nature of obsession.
As a Prague-based journalist and frequent New York Times contributor who regularly writes about alcohol, food and travel, Rail clearly has the skill set needed to tell this story; he even once wrote a feature on absinthe for The Times.
In his roaming research, he encounters a woman involved in the “absinthe underground” of gray-market collectors who has a simple answer as to why someone would pay a premium for a dusty bottle of liquor that was sealed in a wall or buried in a cellar for a century. “People buy pre-bans because they want to drink them,” she tells Rail. “They want to make it part of their lives, part of their own bodies.”
That physical desire to connect with the past may seem extreme, but it also plays as an elegy for the passing of a more civilized era, however idealized it may be. As Rail observes, “I realized the world had lost its culture of drinking absinthe, so much so that most people didn’t even know how to serve it and connoisseurs themselves struggled to grasp how to use equipment.”
“The Absinthe Forger” uses Christian’s crime as a way to explore the spirits world, but the book also feels like a time-travel quest, one that means going deeply into obsessive collector mode. As one aficionado ironically reflects, “In a way, absinthe really did lead to insanity.”
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