Absinthe in History, the myths and lies surrounding it, and tasting the Green Fairy. Absinthe has long been the subject of myth and fiction, lies and adoration. It was enormously popular during the Bell Epoque, the latter half of the 1800's and into the early 1900's in France, particularly Paris. It was favored by impressionists and artists, and working people, and sex workers, and the proletariate, and Bolsheviks and revolutionaries, and etc. It had none of the aristocratic trappings of wine, and so it was enjoyed by anyone who couldn't afford to pretend to aristocracy or who flatly despised the notion of aristocrats.
It was banned through a concerted effort by French wine companies to put their competition out of business, they created a moral panic surrounding the consumption of Absinthe using bogus research trumped up by a guy called Doctor Magnan. The wine companies managed to co-opt a growing global temperance movement and thus good upstanding French wine triumphed over degenerate working class absinthe.
The funny thing about the lies the wine companies told about Absinthe is that they stuck. The forbidden fruit is sweet, and in outlawing Absinthe people got it into their heads that there must be something outright amazing about the stuff. The Green Fairy, long used in advertising and in poetic musings about Absinthe, become something almost real in peoples minds. Absinthe surely must have been a dangerous hallucinogen, how else can you explain the ban, or impressionistic art for that matter? Well it's not. It never was. In this episode is hope to put these myths to rest, briefly cover the reasons for the ban and how it was effected, and also to taste a few examples of modern absinthe. In this episode I'll be tasting: Pernod, St. George, La Muse Verte, Doc Herson's, and Letherbee Charred Oak Absinthe Brun. They're all pretty great, but I do pick a favorite in the video.
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