In the dimly lit mad-scientist laboratory where distiller Lance Winters works, the scattered debris creates a sort-of topographical map of his winding alcohol-spirit journeys. Boxes of ripe blood oranges clutter a long table. There are odd-sized beakers filled with old samples from years of failed batches of bootleg absinthe (although it didn’t make the final cut, chamomile worked well; noble fir needles, not so much) and plastic baggies bulging with unfamiliar herbs. A shelf is holds herbal reference books and volumes on flavor science.
There is also a tattered copy of Gray’s Anatomy. It looks well-thumbed.
The lab is tucked into a corner of the airy, million-square-foot former Naval hangar across a shipping channel from Oakland, in which St. George Spirits, where Winters is master distiller, makes and bottles its powerful boozes, Hangar One Vodkas, Malt Whiskey, St. George Eau de Vies, and its ground-breaking Absinthe Verte. Everything is distilled in two gleaming, copper, hand-made Bavarian contraptions that look like the combination of a one-man submarine and a giant clarinet.
During a recent visit, as he finished up his third batch of commercial absinthe, the air in the enormous hangar was infused with a sometimes sweet, sometimes earthy, herbal perfume. Up on the big still’s platform sat an innocent-looking carton overflowing with the dry-earth-colored stalks of the herb, wormwood -- a boxful of the peculiar soul of the world’s most notorious drink, trying to look casual.
When I ask what first interested him in absinthe, Lance Winters answers quickly, “The lore.” At first I think he has said, “The Lord,” and for a few nervous minutes sitting in his lab I operate under that assumption. Such is his almost religious devotion to the purity of his spirits. And such is the profound nature of the quest to save absinthe from its past.
Born under a bad sign, absinthe began life as a semi-quackish, offensive tasting curative for the varied bodily ills in 17th Century Switzerland, where its key and most controversial ingredient, the bitter herb wormwood, grows in abundance. Soon distillers began to refine absinthe into something still bitter but drinkable.
But it was the French, during a series of late 1800s wine shortages, who embraced it wholeheartedly as their drink of choice. They’re French, they needed something. And so they rhapsodized it, immortalized it, imbibed it daily.
Naturally there came an influx of cheap absinthes to exploit this moment of popularity. These were criminally awful liquids that ranged from the horribly bitter to the literally poisonous, with dangerous green dyes (absinthe is traditionally green-hued) and toxic alcohol bases. Suddenly absinthe was cheap, cheaper than wine, cheaper than bread. It became the drug of choice for alcoholics, for destitute artists.
Even as bad absinthe made people sick, as overindulgence made them act badly, even violently, the drink became ubiquitous at fin-de-siecle cafes. It became popular in paintings then judged worthless, today priceless. Lautrec painted it. Van Gough. Degas. And finally, Picasso.
“It was safe to attack absinthe because the people that drank it, they were the scourge of society,” says Winters. “They were these people that called themselves artists, but they painted in bizarre colors and shapes. They were poets and who needed poets?”
***
Egged on by the evidence of the affects of bad absinthe, and especially by a worried and jealous national wine industry, the French government turned on it, destroying its reputation with all manner of hysterical calumny -- absinthe made men hallucinate, it made women harlots, it turned infants into degenerates.
The French banned it. So did the Swiss. The United States, believing the key ingredient wormwood to be the source of some hallucinatory power, banned the herb’s import, and essentially, the drink, in 1912.
Ban it, of course, and the lore begins. The lore always takes care of itself. A legend began, a myth was born, of absinthe as artistic muse, as opium in a glass.
***
It took Winters eleven years and nine-and-a-half carefully-executed batches of bootleg absinthe to arrive at something that truly thrilled his palate. Getting there had felt like the first time he’d gone to Disneyland as a kid; today his description of the moment borders on the orgasmic.
“I had this feeling right in my solar plexus that was just starting to radiate,” he says. “It’s the same feeling. It’s like, oh my God, it’s here. This is beautiful.”
Nothing could match the buzz he got walking into a familiar bar or a room full of friends, hoisting a bottle of his latest absinthe, and seeing the knowing smiles spread: tonight we drink something mysterious, delicious, illegal, and potent.
Last year, when America’s alcohol bureaucracy agreed to allow it to be made and sold here again, after ninety years underground, naturally someone asked Winters if he planned to bottle his bootleg absinthe and take it commercial.
His answer: Never.
It was too precious, too personal. Sharing it was meant to be private, intimate, a little illicit, and Winters wanted to keep it underground, down where the drinkers roll.
“I loved that feeling,” he says, “of being able to have something that they appreciated. And I didn’t want to cheapen that aspect of it.”
Once Winters let go, and released his St. George Spirits Absinthe Verte, the first ever commercial, American-made absinthe, he became a member of a very small club.
Barely a year into absinthe’s sensational rebirth, a tiny handful of Americans are making some of the best stuff available, but perhaps only Winters is making absinthe his own. It’s fair to say that American purists have fallen into something like love with absinthe, and are determined to save it, like a French whore with a heart of gold, from itself and its reputation, and especially from any charlatan eager to corrupt its precious original formula. Primarily they cling to a quest for authenticity of taste; the purist’s goal in the bottle is reproduction. It might be more accurate to say the obsession is replication.
But of what?
While there is general agreement that absinthe’s essential ingredients are anise, fennel, and wormwood, all steeped in a clean spirit base of grain alcohol, beat alcohol, or brandy, there is no official, regulatory, base-definition of absinthe. Outside of Switzerland, no government has given absinthe a classification, like for whiskey or vodka, within which clear rules of distillation and ingredients would apply.
For now, purists insist that truly authentic absinthe can only be made with an intimate knowledge of hard-to-obtain vintage bottles.
When Winters made his very first batch of illicit absinthe eleven years ago, he’d never tasted even a dram of the green fairy. Now his bold take on absinthe’s conventional herbal profile has begun to modernize the powerful liquor. For now, while the purists tend to speak admiringly of Absinthe Verte, they are also quick to point out that it represents a digression from what those lucky Belle Époque Frenchmen enjoyed.
Winters and I are sipping absinthe, legally, after dinner at Flora, a busy restaurant in Oakland’s burgeoning Uptown neighborhood. Good absinthe should be as much an olfactory pleasure as it is a pleasure on the tongue and throat and mind. And it is this sense of inspiration, in the most literal sense of the word, that immediately transfers to the imbiber as a glass of Absinthe Verte nears the nose and mouth. There it is: the earthiness of the wormwood, the sweetness of the star anise, the fennel’s grassiness. Next comes the momentarily intimidating power of the wafting brandy base. Then you sip it and it’s a mural on the tongue. And you find yourself delighted, and quite certain, that after nearly a hundred years underground, the powerful booze with the reputation for havoc is truly back.
And back it is. Winters estimates that in all maybe 300 people tasted the fruits of his underground batches. Last, St. George Spirits estimates it sold 100,000 bottles. I’ve been to Flora before when the bar was lined with glasses of the cloudy greenish drink prepared the traditional way: ice water dripped over sugar cubes and through slotted absinthe spoons. Tonight is the same, as bottles of Absinthe Verte, with the crazy monkey on the label, swing from shelf to bar and back.
That particular preparation, known as the French drip, always seems too sweet to me, and so I order mine the way I like it: straight, with a couple of ice cubes. In no way does good absinthe require added sweetness. What bitterness it holds only serves to make it more interesting, to give it presence.
There is no question of the suggestion of black licorice, and some think that’s a taste for which Americans have no palate. But you shouldn’t let a distaste for licorice or anise prevent you from trying absinthe. In the good stuff, and certainly in Absinthe Verte, the balance of the herbs, and the intensity of their interplay with their clear alcohol base, dazzle the tongue away from lingering on any one element.
It’s a notoriously difficult balance to achieve. One distiller famously put beakers of vintage, pre-ban absinthe through a spectrometer to find the precise ingredients classic distillers used. Winters approach is more art, less science.
“Mozart didn’t have to break apart the auditory spectrum to say ‘this is what sounds beautiful, this is what is truly pleasing to the soul,’” he says. “With this, all the chemicals are there; they do their shit. Whether you make them do it or not, they do it. What we’re making them do is sing all their harmonies in the right way.”
At Flora with Winters, sipping absinthe after years of reading and hearing about it, yearning for the experience, after years of never expecting to drink it, I take in the herbs and the burn. The restaurant is a fairly new place, lively, still gleaming, its art and high ceilings and long curving bar done in an Art Deco style to mark the era of the great old building it’s in.
Looking around, it’s easy to imagine this 1930s-style dining room packed with chain-smoking men in suits hitting on secretaries in stockings; easy to picture lithe, flirtatious, secret Lesbians with bobbed hair and clunky shoes, leaning into each other furtively at the bar. It’s an image and a moment I love; but I understand I can’t ever live it. I understand that this place is not a perfect replica, not a chimerical attempt to go back, but an affectionate, modern architectural nod. Like Absinthe Verte, it’s a perfect, beautiful echo.
Five to Try
Outside of New Orleans, absinthe made little impact in the United States in its heyday a century ago. But this time around, Lance Winters and a small group of Americans are making some of the best stuff out there. Invariably, their creations achieve that remarkable progression from the sweet to the bitter that makes every mouthful of absinthe such a trip.
Jade Nouvelle-Orleans
Ted Breaux
Combier, France
If Lance Winters is absinthe’s modern face, Ted Breaux, a native of New Orleans, is its sternest Puritan. A fierce champion of tradition and authenticity, Breaux makes his spirits at a 130-year old distillery in France, using herbs from the original cultivars of absinthe’s glory days. He famously put pre-ban absinthe through a spectrometer to determine its precise chemical make-up, so that he could re-create the very stuff that inspired the likes of Van Gogh and Oscar Wilde. It was worth it. With its brandy base and European wormwood, Nouvelle Orleans, which Breaux distributes under his Jade label, simply mesmerizes the senses. The palate tingles. The anise alerts you to the coming pleasure like the first chord of “A Hard Days Night,” its sweetness in perfect harmony with the eventual bite of the wormwood. The flavor lingers on the tongue, and longer in the mind. It’s an epiphany. But I couldn’t tell you if Breaux’s products are “authentic,” because like all but a few people on earth, I’ve never tasted pre-ban absinthe. Given the sublime pleasure of Nouvelle Orleans, it seems unimportant.
Lucid Absinthe Superieure
Ted Breaux
Combier, France
Apparently a great finish is a Ted Breaux trademark. Lucid is the widely-distributed absinthe Breaux makes, also in France, for Viridian Spirits. Don’t be fooled by its cheesy, velvet-painting-black bottle adorned with two glowing cat’s eyes at the neck and the word “Lucid” written in fun-house-mirror lettering at the base. Inside is some sophisticated liquor. If this is not the monumental achievement that Nouvelle Orleans represents, if it lacks that spirit’s complexity, it is also about half the price. The primary difference is in the base: beet alcohol in Lucid, as opposed to brandy in Nouvelle Orleans. Thus Lucid takes its effect in a more leisurely way, as if the gentler base gives the anise and fennel more time to establish their benevolent power, just before Lucid finally enflames the mouth and animates the senses. Its presence is felt long after the glass is empty.
North Shore Distillery Sirene Absinthe Verte
Derek Kassebaum
Lake Bluff, Illinois
Ice water (absinthe’s traditional mixer) causes the essential oils from the herbs to reconstitute, which turns the traditionally green liquor a milky white. Aficionados call this transformation “louching,” French for “clouding up.” Kassebaum’s Sirene has a golden glow at its core, which probably should have alerted me to its fiery nature. Instead, watching it slowly louche like the drifting in of a soft coastal fog, I thought I had found a surprisingly gentle absinthe. Wrong. Sirene may be serene on the outside, but its essence is heat. Its sweet herbs hit you one-by-one, like low cards from a black-jack dealer. But in the end they succumb to a royal spiciness. Sirene exits burning.
Leopold Bros Absinthe Verte
Todd Leopold
Denver
In the United States, there are no official rules for an absinthe recipe. Makers generally agree that it must have anise, fennel and wormwood, all steeped in a base of clean, clear alcohol. After that, it’s up to you, and Todd Leopold might be making the boldest move of all: for his base, he uses twice-distilled Pisco, a grape-based alcohol from Chile. His potent Absinthe Verte overtakes the palate like the Marines at Normandy. It is boisterous from start to finish, as its bold floral scents and strikingly sweet introduction promptly give way to a peppery finish. It’s like a really wild night at a great bar that ends in a fist fight, and even the fist fight was fun.
Marteau Absinthe de la Belle Epoque
Gwydion Stone
Portland
Seattle-based Gwydion Stone makes his absinthe with the innovative distillers at House Spirits in Portland. Like Breaux, he’s an avid traditionalist, as you can see from the name of his absinthe. (Stone is the creator of the fascinating web site, wormwoodsociety.org). His base is grape and his herbs European. As with each of these American absinthes, there is no need to add sugar to a glass of Marteau; it starts with a jab of sweetness, promptly followed with a manly punch of alcoholic power that could knock you into the next week, if not the 19th Century. Still, if this is what Belle Époque Frenchman were drinking in all those famous paintings of them, one wonders why they don’t look happier.
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