Is This Bottle Corked__ The Secret Life of Wine - Kathleen Burk [35]
How did steam drive Toulouse-Lautrec to absinthe?
THINK OF A fin-de-siècle French café and the chances are you think not of wine but of absinthe, a strange spirit invented by the inappropriately named Dr. Pierre Ordinaire in 1792. He offered it as a panacea; containing the egregious-tasting anise and, more important, wormwood (which contains a psychoactive compound, thujone), absinthe was modestly successful.
But what happened in the next hundred years that caused absinthe first to triumph, then to be seen as a threat to health and French civilization? And why did the French government eventually ban it from sale in France, a ban that continues to this day?
First, it should be said that absinthe is perhaps not the most benevolent of drinks. Taken to anything resembling excess, thujone has a tendency to cause a strange disorientation and even hallucinations. Not for nothing was it nicknamed La Fée Verte—the Green Fairy.
Nor do artists’ representations of its devotees inspire great joy. Manet’s painting of 1867 shows a solitary absinthe drinker, with shaggy beard, tall, battered hat, and a strange smeared expression, beside his glass of absinthe: the drink has taken on the louche—the pearlescent milkiness that the spirit acquires when mixed with water. He himself, like the room he’s in, is out of focus: brown, blurred and bleary. Nine years later, Degas’s Absinthe Drinkers are faring no better: they sit side by side on a hard bench before cold marble tables, both looking ahead, disconnected from the world and from each other. Perhaps the most dispiriting is Picasso’s 1901 painting: an angular and seemingly anguished woman in a blue dress, her thin arms and bony hands wrapped around herself. In front of her are the absinthe glass and a blue water fountain; otherwise she is as utterly alone as can be. The only glamorous absinthe painting we know of is by the Czech artist Viktor Oliva. It hangs in the Café Slavia in Prague and shows us a man in evening dress gazing at the human-sized figure of the curvaceous, alluring fée verte; in the background, another smartly dressed man is approaching—a friend, perhaps, who will find little companionship in the drinker, who is already in a world of illusions.
Not, then, a companionable drink; not a promoter of commensality or conversation. The paintings of absinthe drinkers depict it more as a drug than as a drink, more like opium than like wine.
To find out the reason for the absinthe craze, we need to wind the clock back to the North American colonies of the seventeenth century. The French colonists in Florida first experimented with Vitis vinifera, the European wine grape. It was not a success, and they did not quite know why. But in due course they had more luck with native grapes.
They continued experimenting with hybrids, but the idea that vinifera was no good in America persisted, despite its doing well in California.
Unknown to them, the French Americans had made a mistake. The problems with vinifera were being caused by an aphid, the North American grape phylloxera. This, they failed to notice, was for a number of reasons. One is that phylloxera kills European grapes by injecting a poison into the vine, which swells and eventually kills the small roots. It behaves differently on North American vines, living mainly on the leaves, where it causes harmful galls but affects the roots much less badly. Another aspect of its behavior is that, feeding on the roots of vinifera, the phylloxera aphid will rapidly abandon ship when the osmotic pressure in the now-diseased root falls. Dig up the dead vine and there’s nothing to see: the aphids have long gone.
Viticulture is an international business, and almost from the outset, European growers were experimenting with American vines. Yet there was no hint of phylloxera until the early 1860s, when