A Hedonist in the Cellar_ Adventures in Wine - Jay McInerney [77]
Jancis Robinson informs me that in this one area at least, we are well ahead of the British: “Americans are lucky to have importers who have scoured the countryside of Champagne in search of these small growers.” At present there are more than 130 small-grower Champagnes imported here. In addition to the aforementioned, my short list includes L. Aubry, Gaston Chiquet, René Geoffrey, Pierre Gimonnet, J. Lassalle, Pierre Moncuit, Alain Robert, Michel Turgy, and Vilmart & Cie.
These small producers represent less than 2 percent of the domestic market. But they are being noticed. Moët recently launched three single-vineyard Champagnes.
Smaller isn’t always better. I usually have a bottle of Veuve Clicquot or Perrier-Jouët in my refrigerator, and I happen to be very fond of Krug Grande Cuvée, Bollinger Grande Année, Dom Pérignon, Taittinger Comtes de Champagne, and several other Grandes Marques Champagnes. But this year I’m making more room in my cellar for handcrafted, artisanal Champagnes.
THE WILD GREEN FAIRY
Absinthe
It certainly feels illegal—what with all the paraphernalia, the special glasses and spoons, the hookahlike silver-and-crystal fountain at the center of the table, and the ritual aspects of preparation. I’m getting that anticipatory tingle I used to get when drugs were being readied for consumption. We are sitting in a courtyard in the French Quarter of New Orleans. Our connection is Ted Breaux, a compact, muscular New Orleans native with fashionably spiked hair. Breaux is slowly drizzling water from the fountain into a silver funnel balanced on a crystal glass; the emerald liquid in the glass gradually turns milky with the infusion. We are preparing to drink absinthe.
Breaux was cruising the French Quarter one afternoon a decade ago when he spotted some absinthe glasses and spoons in the window of Lucullus, an antique shop dedicated to the culinary arts. “I found it fascinating that there was a special type of glassware and paraphernalia,” says Breaux. “It was evidence that the drink existed.” An environmental scientist whose family arrived in New Orleans in 1724, Breaux had been curious about the outlawed liqueur since college, when a fellow chemistry major had mentioned it. “I looked it up in the Merck Index. It says that the ingestion of absinthe can cause hallucinations, convulsions, and death. I wondered, What did people get out of it?” That very week he happened to notice Barnaby Conrad’s Absinthe in a book catalog. He ordered the book, corresponded with the author, and sought out other researchers. An obsession was being born.
Breaux would hardly be the first to become obsessed by the so-called Green Fairy. Some of the greatest artists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came under its spell; writers like Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Oscar Wilde—a roll call of the premodern decadents—not only drank it but wrote about le Fée Verte. Painters like Manet, van Gogh, Gauguin, and Toulouse-Lautrec were devotees of the cult. Absinthe was to Symbolism and Postimpressionism what heroin was to Seattle grunge. Absinthe cultists ascribed mystical, meditative, and even halluncinatory powers to their beverage of choice; opponents saw it as an insidious poison. Both sides agreed that it was something more than just another alcoholic beverage. In 1905, when a Swiss farmer killed his wife and children, allegedly under the influence of absinthe, the calls for prohibiton swelled. Within a decade it was banned throughout Europe and the United States.
Outlaw status has only enhanced the mystique of absinthe over the years. Ted Breaux, for one, was haunted by the myth. After discovering a recipe in an old French book on the subject, he decided to make a batch. “I made it and tried it and I was underwhelmed,” he says, sitting in the courtyard behind Lucullus. “It just didn’t taste like something that could be that popular. But then