Boozehound - Jason Wilson [6]
Over the next twelve months, absinthe seemed very much in demand, dovetailing with another new fad for classic, speakeasy-era cocktails. The New York Times, in December 2007, announced “A Liquor of Legend Makes a Comeback.” Nearly every lifestyle publication followed suit, championing the obscure, notorious spirit’s return. By the end of 2008, at least a half dozen premium absinthe brands had come on the market, most selling for more than sixty dollars a bottle, including one called Mansinthe created by Marilyn Manson. You knew the inevitable backlash was only a matter of time, but even jaded observers had to be surprised at just how swiftly the cognoscenti gave the official Thumbs Down on poor old absinthe.
The first New York Times Sunday Styles section of 2009 declared absinthe “uncool,” with Styles reporter Eric Konigsberg calling it “falsely subversive” and likening absinthe to such fleeting cultural fads as cigar bars, soul patches, women’s lower-back tattoos, brushed-nickel kitchen fixtures, and “blogging about one’s bikini grooming.” He wrote, “Once the naughty aura of the forbidden fruit is removed, all that remains is a grasp at unearned sophistication.”
The San Francisco Chronicle’s Food section was more blunt, calling absinthe “out” in its 2009 New Year’s predictions. Harsher still: “We liked it much better when it was illegal. Somehow the notion of being illicit overrides the flavor of NyQuil dripping down your throat.”
As I observed this phenomenon, I thought, “Well, duh.” Americans mostly don’t like the taste of licorice. Absinthe is flavored with anise, giving it a strong licorice taste. These two basic truths pretty much ensured that the spirit would never be enduringly popular in the United States. So presenting the sleight-of-hand notion that absinthe was ever “cool” before being reported as “uncool”—essentially hyping absinthe, then twelve months later calling it overhyped—is breathtakingly shallow even by the usual standards of lifestyle journalism. It smacks of high school.
But maybe this makes sense. There’s always been a whiff of adolescence when it comes to Americans and absinthe, a teenage sort of longing to experience something thrilling and subversive—drama followed by the callow need to point out, Holden Caulfield–like, just how phoney it all is.
I can empathize. I first tasted absinthe while on a magazine assignment in the late 1990s, in Barcelona at a dive called Bar Marsella. “An absinthe or two at Bar Marsella” was firmly established as one of the Lonely Planet guide’s “highlights” of the city, and the crowd was a typical mishmash of backpackerish tourists from around the globe. Sure, some Moroccan guys tried to sell me hash outside. Sure, the bartender physically tossed two pickpockets out the door. And sure, that bartender was a dodgy, middle-aged American guy named Scotty, a six-foot-two, well-over-two-hundred-pound, red-haired man who wore pink shirts, who referred to himself as “Super Queer,” who claimed to be a former child actor, and who refused to tell me his last name because “as far as you’re concerned, I don’t have a last name.” Yet for the most part, Bar Marsella was “sketchy” only in a safe, air-quotes sort of way. During my twenties, I’d vaguely imagined myself as some sort of romantic flâneur, a Eurotrash-loving vagabond hanging out in seedy bars, like Rimbaud. In reality, my first sip of absinthe took place when I was a marginally employed twenty-nine-year-old writing an article for an airline in-flight magazine. The letdown was unavoidable.
Had I paid better attention in high school English class, I would have read of this type of anise-flavored disappointment from an earlier chronicler of subversive lifestyle trends, one Ernest Hemingway—once again in “Hills Like