Dancing With The Green Fairy: Absinthe Demystified
It looks like Listerine and tastes like licorice. It might get you seduced by a vampire, like in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, or make you spawn a witch, as in the Broadway show Wicked. It might turn you into a famous writer, like Wilde or Hemingway. It might make you the world’s most renowned suicidal painter, like Vincent Van Gogh. Could it conjure a Green Fairy, like in Moulin Rouge? Absinthe is a drink of legends, banned from the United States for almost a century, but it might just be some really strong booze.
The liquor’s licorice flavor comes from anise seeds, but what makes absinthe absinthe, is a wildflower called wormwood. For centuries, people have used wormwood as medicine – it takes its name as a treatment for intestinal worms – and you can still find it in your local pharmacy. But, like many homeopathic remedies, it’s been associated with witchcraft – reading the stars, calling forth spirits, enducing visions. A chemical in wormwood called thujone has been linked to hallucinations. Anthropologist Michael Harner has argued that the witches-riding-broomsticks myths might have developed because women applied botanical oils made from stuff like wormwood to a certain mucous membrane using the handiest domestic instrument they could find.
“Perhaps the witches were hallucinating that they could fly,” says Alison Martlew, a bartender at Dos Perros cantina in Durham. “[Absinthe] does feel a teeny little bit trippy.”
Dos Perros had a bottle of La Fée NV Absinthe Verte, a cheap, artificially green French import. Martlew let me taste a sip – kind of like cough medicine, but you’re not supposed to drink it straight anyway. It’s 38-percent ABV, whereas the better absinthes are often at least a third higher. Absinthe wasn’t a big seller at Dos Perros — the almost-full bottle had a pricetag from the state liquor store dated February 2012.
The fact that you can get real absinthe in the U.S. at all took a feat of legal reinterpretation in 2007. Prior to that, legislators and bartenders alike operated under the assumption that the legendary liquor was still banned under anti-thujone regulations. Once the parties involved took a hard look at the trace amounts of thujone in authentic absinthe, the liquor was deemed legal.
Around the corner at the high-end cocktail bar Alley 26, bow-tied proprietor Shannon Healy makes me a Sazerac, perhaps the most popular of absinthe drinks. It’s something like an Old-Fashioned – sugar, bitters, rye and lemon. What makes it a Sazerac is a splash of absinthe, in this case a 110-proof Absente brand imported from southern France, yellower than the Scope-colored NV. By tradition, a bartender merely rinses a lowball glass with absinthe and pours it out, leaving just traces to flavor the mix.