Boozehound - Jason Wilson [7]
“It tastes like licorice,” the girl said and put the glass down.
“That’s the way with everything.”
“Yes,” said the girl. “Everything tastes of licorice. Especially all the things you’ve waited so long for, like absinthe.”
It may be true. That’s not to say that the actual absinthe, in the glass, was bad. It was enjoyable, particularly when you drizzled the water over the sugar cube and through the slotted spoon. But by that point in my life, I’d already experienced enough licorice-tasting firewaters to have an idea of what to expect. Absinthe, in reality, just seemed like a stronger, more bitter, more herbal version of the sambuca I’d snuck out of my parents’ liquor cabinet. And by comparison, my old act of stealing the sambuca had its own small but genuine element of subversiveness. No matter how much I wanted to feel edgy or illicit sitting in a seedy bar in Barcelona years later, how could legally purchased absinthe ever compare to stolen sambuca? Even Rimbaud had moved beyond his absinthe-drinking flâneur stage by the age of nineteen: having shocked the bourgeoisie quite enough for one lifetime, he never wrote another line of poetry.
Viewed this way, the idea that you could ever hope to sustain the imagination of adults with a sixty-dollar bottle of absinthe becomes absurd. Sure, many will purchase a bottle and try it—once—out of curiosity: Will it make me hallucinate? Will I become a decadent anarchist and write Symbolist poetry? Will I cut my own ear off, like Van Gogh? When none of that happens and they realize they don’t really like licorice, they’ll shove the bottle into the back of their liquor cabinet, where it will languish for the next decade or so. My advice to these people’s future children: if the absinthe bottle has a pourer spout, don’t try to unclog it with a pencil.
Perhaps we experience drinks very much like we experience the popular songs of our youth. An ounce and a half of booze, a three-minute song—ephemeral for sure, yet in the right context you may remember it your whole life. We know that no new song—regardless of how well made it is—will ever matter as much the one we heard as a teenager with a broken heart. Similarly, maybe no drink matters quite like the first ones we procure, with our own guile and wits, for ourselves. Only later, as we trudge into adulthood, do we realize that many of the things we wait for our whole lives do indeed taste of licorice. I believe this is why so many Americans end up drinking what they enjoyed in high school or college. Disappointed, people fall back on the visceral experience of memory. Of course memories are important, but as I’ve gone deeper into the world of spirits, I’ve been determined to keep new visceral experiences front and center.
Taste is so subjective, so fickle, and a source of so much insecurity. Anyone who’s in the business of sipping or chewing (or, for that matter, looking at paintings or listening to music or watching television) and then passing judgment will inevitably have the experience of his or her taste being called into question: “Why should we trust you?” After a particularly intense stretch of tastings during the first year of my job—my palate seemingly on overload—I found myself asking this very question. Of myself.
So I decided to pay a visit to a guy who’d been doing this a lot longer than I have: F. Paul Pacult, publisher of the influential quarterly newsletter Spirit Journal. Over two decades, Pacult has emerged as a sort of Robert Parker of the spirits industry. The latest edition of his booze compendium, Kindred Spirits 2, the follow-up to his seminal 1997 guide, reviews more than twenty-four hundred spirits and rates them on a one-to-five-star scale. I had not met Pacult before, though I’ve regularly consulted my dog-eared copy of the first Kindred Spirits over the past ten years.
As I drove up to meet him in Wallkill, in New York’s Hudson Valley, I worried I’d find the ultimate spirits snob—someone who might unmask me as