Absinthe, legend has it, starred in the very first cocktail. Pale green, potent and deadly alluring, the drink in its day spawned a verb, a disease and, in Paris, its very own intoxicating time of day - L'heure Verte. To painters, poets and their imitators, absinthe became liquid muse, sipped, swirled and savored with passion until its ban a century ago.
American importers and distillers, thirsty to revive a taste of the past, last year persuaded the government to end the 100-year prohibition. Their challenge now, perhaps more formidable, is to make the storied beverage relevant, if not romantic, for the prosaic modern drinker.
To that end, makers of the first legalized brands are touring the country, hitting town after town, including Baltimore, trying to get people not only to notice absinthe at the bar, but to buy into the whole green hallucinogenic fairy tale.
"What other drink has got this kind of history and romance and aura about it?" asks Gwydion Stone, a distiller who loves absinthe so much that he founded a society to honor it. "It's the most interesting drink that you can imagine."
At Ixia in Mount Vernon, the powers behind Kubler, the second absinthe approved for sale in the United States, recently invited guests to cross a velvet rope and sample their contemporary spin on the drink.
Combining the fantastic with the vulgar, the Swiss company filled the space with glowing, under-lit absinthe fountains and "green fairies," models who flitted about the bar with wings pinned onto their backs and "shirts" painted onto their breasts. They served absinthe as the French used to - choreographed and slow - even as they mixed it into cute-named cocktails like the Van Gone and the Red Fairy, with raspberry soda, flavored vodka and Red Bull.
Kubler officials watched a waiter prepare a classic absinthe by dripping water languidly from the fountain into a glass of the greenish drink. Before hitting the absinthe, the water passed over a sugar cube poised atop a slotted silver spoon. Drop by drop, the liquid clouded, swirling in the glass like witch's brew.
"Table theater," importer Rich Dorkin declared with a wink.
Denis Nash, a Baltimore banker, sipped a Hemingway, a mix of absinthe, raspberry vodka and fruit juices. Though it might have offended the writer, he of the big guns and the big game, to have his name on such an effete drink, Nash pronounced this one quite tasty - if not a bit disillusioning. After nearly the whole glass, he was neither hallucinating, erupting in poetry or even all that tipsy.
