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By Root 342 0

a friend of mine popped up with a bottle of vintage Edouard Pernod absinthe.” It was as if an amateur paleontologist had suddenly gotten his hands on a live triceratops. “Finally, I could taste it.” At almost the same time, he came across a second bottle, through his friends at Lucullus. After he tasted this one too, he says, “I could definitely see why it was so popular. But the vintage samples were so different from what I made that I got discouraged.” Not for long, however; he had the old samples analyzed in a French lab and started experimenting again. In the meantime, new European Union regulations eventually superseded the old national laws banning absinthe. Through a friend, Breaux got into contact with a Frenchman who’d bought an old distillery in the Loire with original absinthe stills, from which he now produces some three thousand bottles a year.

Absinthe is made by distilling herbs in spirits and then distilling the infused spirits again. The color of a properly made absinthe comes from chlorophyll. Breaux’s is far more complex and refined than the other two alleged absinthes I’ve tried—a little bitter, with a strong anise flavor in the middle and a touch of fennel and a bit of mint toward the end. “Some of the herbs are excitatory and some are sedative,” Breaux says. “You combine the two and it’s kind of like a mild herbal speedball.”

This pretty well describes the sensation I am experiencing after a couple of glasses of Breaux’s absinthe, which starts out at 140 proof, before being diluted with water. I feel completely alert and slightly buzzed at the same time, floating a little above the company even as I am thoroughly present and engaged. My scalp and fingertips are tingling, whether because of the slight November chill or the liqueur, I can’t be certain. I notice for the first time the blond flecks in Breaux’s hair, which look like tiny flames. I feel that something wonderful is surely about to happen. If anything, this state I’m in reminds me of sitting back after doing a couple of lines and a shot of tequila. But it’s somehow different. Breaux is talking about thujone, the chemical compound found in the absinthe plant that is suspected of being the active and potentially dangerous compound in the drink … about how cheap imitation absinthe was responsible for ruining the reputation of the real thing … about how his house was destroyed in the flooding after Katrina.

Sometime later we float over to the Old Absinthe House, the famous if somewhat shabby bar on Bourbon Street, which specialized in absinthe cocktails before Prohibition. Still later we will drive through the desolate streets of flood-ravaged neighborhoods outside the Quarter. But before that, for a perfect hour or so, I am under the spell of the Green Fairy, listening with keen attention to Breaux and listening to myself talking with unusual precision and grace, or at least so it seemed to me then.

WHAT I DRANK ON MY

FORTY-EIGHTH BIRTHDAY

My friend Jancis Robinson, who has celebrated several birthdays with me, asked me to send a report on my forty-eighth, along with wine notes, to be posted on her Web site.

Dear Jancis:

Here’s what I drank for my birthday last week. Of course I went through eighteen different plans, several of which involved my cooking. However, when the guest list reached nine I decided to leave the cooking to the pros. I didn’t, however, want to leave the wine to the pros—i.e., I didn’t want to pay a 200 or 300 percent markup on wines that probably wouldn’t be mature anyway—which is the position we find ourselves in when we dine fashionably in New York. So I picked Canton, one of the few places here that I knew wouldn’t mind my lugging in a case of wine, plus Riedel glasses. (Actually, I had thirteen bottles, this being my birth date and lucky number.) The cuisine was a challenge—Cantonese. Not your average oenophile’s first choice. But I like a challenge.

I started us off with a magnum of 1990 Dom Pérignon, a great vintage for them that has been drinking nicely since its release. Even in this big vintage it