Good Grape Wine Company

Absinthe is a high-proof alcohol drink to which has been added essential oils of wormwood, plus aniseed or fennel, which taste like liquorice and gave the famous clear green color. It became particularly a drink for French Bohemian writers and artists. Adams shows, however, that the poets and painters who concentrated on absinthe as a subject were minor artists busy cultivating a bohemian atmosphere around themselves; the greater artists might have included it as part of their world, but had no particular fascination for it. Wormwood has a chemical called thujone within it, which might be a mild hallucinogen, but there is question that it would have had any significant effect at the dose provided in absinthe. What certainly would have had effect is the high amount of alcohol in the drink. Absinthe's widespread adoption scared the French government, which listened to the experts blaming it for everything from anarchy to population decline to the rise of Jews. A national ban was eventually enforced in 1915. In England, absinthe never had much of a hold, as it was seen as representing everything corrupt about France. In the US, those who provided alcohol during prohibition had little interest in this particular aperitif, and when prohibition was lifted, absinthe remained on the list of banned drugs. It was still available to American expatriates in different countries in Europe, and when the Cold War ended, tourism to such places as Prague brought a new boom in absinthe-drinking.

Except that there was little to match the extravagant reports of a century before. Absinthe became trendy with some rock stars (one ad campaign said, "Tonight we're gonna party like it's 1899"), and it isn't surprising that their experiences of it did not meet those of the introverted Parisian artists that had gone before. Part of the problem is that they are not drinking the same thing. Absinthe from eastern Europe did not smell of aniseed, did not have oils so that it did not turn cloudy during the preparation ceremony, and did not have nearly enough wormwood to cause mental effects above those from the alcohol. Any chemical artistic inspiration just wasn't there. In a fascinating work of history with short biographies of famous drinkers of the time, Adams shows that the problem wasn't chemical. Absinthe met the expectations of a particular crowd of artists who gave it a particular reputation at a particular time. Even if the absintheur rock band Sugar Cubes (lead by the famous Björk) had the absinthe that Van Gogh drank, it would be a bit much to expect equivalent masterpieces.