Boozehound - Jason Wilson [5]
My friends erupted in laughter. L. did, too. I was eventually able to pour the shots, but by then—humiliated in the way only a love-struck teenage boy can be—I’d lost my nerve and pride. When, later, I embarrassingly, tearfully, professed my undying affection to L., she gently patted me on the head and told me I was “a good friend.”
The only other thing I remember from that night is my mother dragging me to my bedroom by the ear, yelling at me. Apparently, my parents found me passed out in the kitchen in my boxers, and I would be grounded for quite some time. Fortunately (or unfortunately), my brother had earlier stashed the sambuca bottle safely in its regular hiding spot. Years later, well after I’d graduated from college, my mother was clearing out the pantry and found it. She remained puzzled as to why there was a broken pencil floating inside a half-empty bottle.
Soon after, L. began dating a guy in his twenties with a classic Mustang who drove around town with photos of L. in his hubcaps as a sign of affection—pretty much a deal maker in 1980s suburban New Jersey. Of course, I was crushed. This was my first true romantic heartbreak, and its sting was so acute that I can vividly recall the feeling more than twenty years later. What could I do? I was still a boy, and no match for a dangerous older man with a Mustang. Stealing that sambuca, gagging down the overwhelming 80-proof anise liqueur—this was about as edgy as I got in those days.
It’s a curious thing about memorable flavors. They always come back.
When I began writing my column, one of the first big spirits stories I covered was the legalization of absinthe. Until 2007, the mythic, louche liqueur of nineteenth-century Parisian decadence was classified as a dangerous, potentially hallucinogenic, and banned substance by the U.S. government. The reason it had always been verboten was because of a chemical called thujone, the active ingredient in wormwood. Wormwood is the mysterious plant that makes absinthe absinthe—the Green Fairy, with its legends of hallucination and belle époque debauchery embraced by writers and artists such as Verlaine, Baudelaire, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Modigliani. By the turn of the twentieth century, absinthe was so popular that the French were drinking thirty-six billion liters of absinthe versus only five billion liters of wine. But then in 1905, some crazy guy in Switzerland named Jean Lanfray, drunk on absinthe, murdered his family—which led to a public outcry against the spirit. One by one, Western nations began banning absinthe. Some historians suggest it was actually the powerful French wine industry, concerned about its eroding market, that helped trump up the Lanfray murder and lobbied for the Green Fairy’s prohibition. Regardless, by 1912 absinthe was illegal in the United States.
But here’s the thing: absinthe was never banned by name. In the United States, the law expressly prohibits any spirit that contains over ten parts per million of thujone. It took nearly a century, but in the late 2000s, someone suddenly had the bright idea to apply a little modern chemistry to the issue. A New Orleans–born chemist named Ted Breaux was creating a new absinthe called Lucid, and he began testing bottles from the late nineteenth century to show that properly made absinthe contained very little thujone. He proved that just about all absinthe, both historical and contemporary, had less than ten parts per million of thujone. The whole thujone scare