Remember absinthe? Around the turn-of-the-millennium, worldwide hipsterdom shivered with naughty anticipation, before taking its first sip of Hill’s, that fluo green “Absinth” from the Czech Republic. (There was a lot of fuss, I recall, around setting fire to sugarcubes perched on filigreed spoons.) Then it waited for the Green Fairy to alight, and imbue it with the spirit of Van Gogh, Jarry, or Baudelaire. Instead, it got a little drunk on ethanol, and, in the midst of the following morning’s hangover, was reminded it never much like anise-flavored drinks anyway.
I feel somewhat responsible for the engouement for absinthe. Way back in 1998, following a tip that absinthe was still widely available in Spain, I hit a bunch of dive bars in Barcelona’s Barrio Chino, in the company of a Belgian pastry chef and a Scottish painter. We started at the Bar Marsella, where a heavy metal drummer, well into his fifth glass, lunged at my forehead with a fork. We made a pit-stop at El Cangrejo, a drag club, and Kentucky, where taxi drivers and prostitutes went on their breaks, before ending up at Bar Pastis, where Edith Piaf played on the jukebox in perpetuity. I had a glass, or two, in each bar. By the end of the night, I was a little more than drunk—wide awake, in fact. My account of the experience1 was published in magazines in the US and England, and I devoted a chapter to my quest for absinthe in my book The Devil’s Picnic. In the years that followed, absinthe was legalized in the European Union, and expensive, government-authorized versions with names like Absente and La Fée Verte began to appear on the shelves of liquor stores around the world. By then, absinthe definitely wasn’t cool any more.
Here’s a little secret, though, one I shared in The Devil’s Picnic: they never stopped making real absinthe in a little valley in the French-speaking west of Switzerland, where the drink was invented. By “real,” I mean absinthe made by macerating leaves of wormwood in alcohol. Wormwood contains large doses of thujone, the ingredient that (as almost everybody in France liked to tell me, with full Gallic authority) “vous rend fou.” I went in search of homemade absinthe, and found that, if I asked nicely, farmers, antique dealers, and pharmacists were willing to reach under a counter and sell me a litre bottle. (The fact that almost every vacant lot in the valley seemed to be planted with leafy thickets of wormwood was kind of a giveaway.) There was no coy nonsense in Switzerland about Green Fairies: they called it La Bleue, because their version had a slightly bluish hue when you diluted it with water. The locals bought dried wormwood in local pharmacies, pre-mixed with hyssop, melissa, and other herbs, and let it soak in 55-degree alcohol purchased from the liquor control board. At a festival in the village of Boveresse, I experienced the full absinthe effect as a Pernod-colored moon rose over the Jura mountains. There were no hallucinations, but an aura appeared around everything I saw, the way chairs and stars and olive trees are delineated in a Van Gogh painting, and I was wide awake and lucid in the midst of inebriation.

In 2005, the Swiss House of Representatives voted to legalize absinthe. (It had been banned over a century earlier, after a laborer in the canton of Vaud murdered his family, though he had also consumed several litres of wine that night.) Distillers began to market legal versions, and I feared that the long tradition of clandestine absinthe-making had disappeared.
When I spent a few weeks in Switzerland last summer, I said to myself, I should really pick up a bottle of La Bleue for old times sake. On my long bike rides around the canton of Vaud, though, I didn’t come across any bottles in wine shops or grocery stores. Not, that is, until I coasted into the stunning, river-valley-nestled village of Romainmôtier. After exploring the 10th-century Cluniac monastery, where an elderly gentleman in a red tunic was giving an alpenhorn recital, I stopped into the local grocery store/post-office. On a shelf behind the salesclerk, I saw a fantastic selection of high-octane, artisanal absinthes from the Val-de-Travers.

I snatched up three bottles, stuffed them into my backpack, and cycled back to Montricher. I was at a writers’ retreat, and I had a plan: I was going to loosen things up by introducing my fellow scribes to Swiss absinthe, the good stuff. After a day’s writing, we met, as we often did, on the terrace next to the library. I’d prepared by filling a carafe with water and ice. No nonsense with sugar cubes—Swiss absinthe is already slightly sweet, so all you have to do is add cold water. The bottle I’d chosen came from the village of Fleurier, and was 68 percent alcohol by volume. It was called “La Guilloudtine,” and, promisingly, the label suggested swift decapitation.
(Note to any editors out there: I uncovered an untold story about absinthe in the place where it was invented that would make for a great travel feature. Just putting it out there…)

There were a half dozen of us, and, as we took our first sips, I told the story of the last time I’d brought Swiss absinthe to another writers’ retreat. It took place in the Canadian Rockies. The writers there had gathered in a fishing boat that had been hauled up a mountain to serve as a cabin. I’d opened three litre bottles, and things degenerated quickly. I’m pretty sure a marriage ended that night; then again, a couple of new relationships began. I ended up with my head between my knees, unable to even swat away the mosquitoes that were feasting on my calves and forearms. (Though they were probably falling dead to the ground after ingesting the toxins in my bloodstream.) This seemed to happen every time I brought real absinthe to a social gathering. Things would start off pleasantly enough, but then everything fell apart, in a sudden, centrifugal way. It was like throwing a grenade into a tea party.
This time, I decided to limit the damage by busting out a single, half-liter bottle. We writers chatted, guardedly at first, about our work. But as we sipped, things slipped and slid in a familiar, and very pleasant, way. Soon the poet from Los Angeles was telling hilariously corny Dad jokes. The British writer was loosening up, spilling some literary gossip, fresh from New York. The Swiss novelist was telling us about the time Francis Ford Coppola came to the psychiatric institution in Buenos Aires where he was volunteering. Then I noticed that the clouds, as I gazed in the direction of snow-topped Mont-Blanc, had exactly the same opalescent glow as the glass of absinthe—my second glass—in front of me. That Van Gogh-like aura began to appear around objects, a sign that things were taking a turn. I was feeling, I swear to Godot, lyrical.
Ah, the absinthe effect. It was good to know that legislation hadn’t eliminated the thujone. (The Swiss, I have to say, always seem to find a way to do pretty much what they want.) It was good to know that, this time around, I knew exactly when to stop.
Namely, at the third glass. Beyond that, the goblins of hangover lie in wait.
…If you’re enjoying these dispatches, I hope you’ll consider upgrading to a paid subscription. This Substack writing is an experiment—so far, I’m enjoying it, but I’ll definitely need some encouragement from readers to keep my gastronomic experiments going, and my family in milk money.
https://www.salon.com/1998/04/22/feature_202/ ↩