The Absinthe Forger by Evan Rail
The Absinthe Forger
During Kat-hrinamester, as we called it, I decided to get myself a little treat and ordered a bottle of absinthe from Austria. It came from a website devoted to sneaking absinthe past US customs, promising discreet packaging but accepting no responsibility if the Feds caught it. (It also charged nearly as much in shipping as for the absinthe itself.) When it arrived, I drank it as a twenty-year-old drinks: a lot, relatively quickly, in my friend’s crappy apartment. My amateur verdict was that it wasn’t anything special.
I was the kind of person the various experts in Evan Rail’s The Absinthe Forger enjoy mocking. (And of course, I would have deserved it.) The frame story of Rails’ delightful book is indeed about an absinthe forger, a niche criminal mastermind who held corks over lighters and doctored liqueurs with fennel oil to create usually-convincing replicas of bottles of absinthe dating from before the WWI-era bans of the spirit across much of Europe. This shadowy figure—referred to for legal reasons with formulas like “Christian, with a common last name hyphenated with an English one”—fails to emerge as the star of the book named after his scam, outshined at all points by the absinthe enthusiasts Rail interviews.
Absinthe has different legal definitions in various countries, but generally speaking, it’s a distilled spirit featuring fennel, anise, and wormwood. This last ingredient is the most exciting and taboo, appearing in Revelation but also blamed for absinthe’s allegedly debilitating effects due to the presence of the neurotoxin thujone in its oil. While thujone seldom, if ever, appears in absinthe in levels able to cause effects on human beings—in part because alcohol neutralizes it in the body—facts seldom interfere with a good moral panic. Blamed for social ills including a sensational murder in Switzerland, absinthe was banned in much of Europe and in the United States in the 1910s, kept alive in Spain and through clandestine operations in Czechia and Switzerland.
Absinthe has different legal definitions in various countries, but generally speaking, it’s a distilled spirit featuring fennel, anise, and wormwood. This last ingredient is the most exciting and taboo, appearing in Revelation but also blamed for absinthe’s allegedly debilitating effects due to the presence of the neurotoxin thujone in its oil.
But: bottles of absinthe produced before the ban occasionally showed up when cellars were cleaned out, and a network of collectors, beverage historians, and gourmands began buying, selling, and trading them. It was this network of enthusiasts that Christian infiltrated to sell his fakes, and these family distillers, chemists, and antiquarians are who Rail interviews in this delightful book (Better than Ezra alum and Baton Rouge native Cary Rene Bonnecaze makes a cameo.) The resulting combination of investigation, travelogue, and tasting notes is an unalloyed treat to read, as sip by sip, train journey by flight, Rail pieces together the story of the absinthe forger.
[Read more book reviews by Chris Turner-Neal, here.]
To his credit, Rail spends almost the entire book remaining remarkably even-handed before hitting Christian with one of the best zingers I have ever read, accusing him of writing prose so purple it’s practically ultraviolet. (The accompanying Christian-penned tasting note is indeed lurid.) If it feels like he’s treading a little too gingerly at times, it’s understandable: no charges are ever brought against the forger for various reasons, and while everyone Rail interviews accepts that he was up to no good (as did this reader), moral and legal certainty are not the same thing. And if he needs to pull his punches a tiny bit to play fair, it’s the smallest of weaknesses in a book that will make most readers look for the vivid green bottles next time they’re at the liquor store. I give The Absinthe Forger a rating of five drunken poets and recommend it highly.
