By Brian Ashcraft [archived here from original article in Wired without permission]
At first, Ted Breaux dismissed the urgent warnings on TV and radio. He even
ignored the sirens that started blaring Saturday afternoon. "The last
two times they evacuated the city, I stayed," says Breaux, 39, a
chemist and environmental microbiologist. But when he woke up on Sunday,
August 28, the hurricane had become a Category 5 and was still bearing down
on New Orleans. He decided it was time to get out of his house on the
floodplain just south of Lake Pontchartrain. He packed his Mitsubishi
Lancer Evolution with all the essentials: clothes, toiletries, a laptop,
some World War II rifles, ammo, and $15,000 worth of absinthe.
It took Breaux six hours to go 20 miles, and a full day to reach refuge in
Huntsville, Alabama. He spent the next week watching Fox News, looking at
aerial photos of New Orleans on his laptop, wondering if his friends had
made it out, and cursing himself for not remembering to grab his original
1908 copy of Aux Pays d'Absinthe.
Raised in New Orleans, a city once dubbed the Absinthe Capital of the
World, Breaux has long been fascinated with the drink. Absinthe is a
140-proof green liqueur made from herbs like fennel, anise, and the
exceptionally bitter leaves of Artemisia absinthium. That last ingredient,
also known as wormwood, gives the drink its name - and its sinister
reputation. For a century, absinthe has been demonized and outlawed, based
on the belief that it leads to absinthism - far worse than mere
alcoholism. Drinking it supposedly causes epilepsy and "criminal
dementia."
Breaux has made understanding the drink his life's work. He has pored over
hundred-year-old texts, few of them in English. He has corresponded with
other amateur liquor historians. The more he's learned, the more he's felt
compelled to use his knowledge of chemistry to crack the absinthe code,
figure out exactly what's in it, puncture the myths surrounding it - and
maybe even drink a glass or two.
Dressed in a black muscle T-shirt, blue jeans, and a Dolce & Gabbana belt,
Breaux looks as if he'd be more at home on Bourbon Street than in a
research lab. It's a humid summer morning in July, about a month before
Hurricane Katrina will strike, and he's showing me around Environmental
Analytical Solutions Inc., a chemical testing facility among the warehouses
and body shops near Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport.
On the outside, EASI is classic New Orleans: red brick, white pillars. But
inside it's more like a set from War Games: dot matrix printers, ancient
PCs, and nine Hewlett-Packard gas chromatography-mass spectrometer machines
attached to large blue tanks of helium and hydrogen. This is where Breaux
does his lab work, testing water samples for pollution and pesticides. In
his downtime, he studies absinthe here.
Using the GCMS apparatus, he's able to break the liqueur down into its
component molecules. "It's like forensics," Breaux says,
gesturing toward the machines. "Give me one microliter of absinthe and
I know exactly what it's going to taste like."
Breaux explains how the testing works. He takes a bottle of the liqueur,
inserts a syringe through the cork (absinthe oxidizes like wine once the
bottle is open), and extracts a few milliliters. He transfers the sample
into a vial, which is lifted by a robotic arm into the gas chromatography
tower. There it is separated into its components. Then the mass
spectrometer identifies them and measures their relative quantities.
One of the ingredients is thujone, a compound in wormwood that is toxic if
it's ingested, capable of causing violent seizures and kidney
failure. Breaux hands me a bottle of pure liquid thujone. "Take a
whiff," he says with an evil grin. I recoil at the odor - it's like
menthol laced with napalm. This is the noxious chemical compound
responsible for absinthe's bad reputation. The question that's been debated
for years is, Just how much thujone is there in absinthe?
Absinthe was first distilled in 1792 in Switzerland, where it was marketed
as a medicinal elixir, a cure for stomach ailments. High concentrations of
chlorophyll gave it a rich olive color. In the 19th century, people began
turning to the minty drink less for pains of the stomach than for pains of
the soul. Absinthe came to be associated with artists and Moulin Rouge
bohemians. Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Van Gogh, and Picasso were
devotees. Toulouse-Lautrec carried some in a hollowed-out cane. Oscar Wilde
wrote, "What difference is there between a glass of absinthe and a
sunset?" Soon absinthe was the social lubricant of choice for a broad
swath of Europeans - artists and otherwise. In 1874, the French sipped
700,000 liters of the stuff; by the turn of the century, consumption had
shot up to 36 million liters, driven in part by a phylloxera infestation
that had devastated the wine-grape harvest.
By the early 20th century, absinthe was becoming popular in America. It
found a natural reception in New Orleans, where the bon temps were already
rolling. Breaux's own great-grandparents were known to enjoy an occasional
glass. But the drink was drawing fire for its thujone content. "It is
truly madness in a bottle, and no habitual drinker can claim that he will
not become a criminal," declared one politician. The anti-absinthe
fervor climaxed in 1905, when Swiss farmer Jean Lanfray shot his pregnant
wife and two daughters after downing two glasses. (Overlooked was what else
Lanfray consumed that day: crème de menthe, cognac, seven glasses of wine,
coffee with brandy, and another liter of wine.) By the end of World War I,
the "green menace" was made illegal everywhere in western Europe
except Spain. No reputable distillery still made it.
The son of a NASA engineer, Breaux was always interested in how things
work. At 13, he snuck out at night and rode his bike to the University of
Louisiana campus to hack into its mainframe. "I'd snoop in people's
records and steal the source code for videogames," he says. When he
was 14, he figured out how to hot-wire bulldozers left overnight at
construction sites; he and his friends would stage races. Later, while
majoring in microbiology in Lafayette, Breaux tended bar and developed an
interest in the chemistry of liquor. "Why is this tequila better than
that one? Because it's aged a certain length of time or made with a higher
concentration of a certain plant," he says. "I could see the
science in it."
Breaux became a connoisseur at a young age. He was shelling out a hundred
bucks for cognac and mystifying his college buddies by bringing Martell
Cordon Bleu to parties. So it's no wonder that, a decade later, immersed in
the history and makeup of absinthe, he was eager to taste the stuff. But it
was nearly impossible to find. He had to content himself with its
paraphernalia. While walking through the French Quarter one Saturday
morning a decade ago, he spotted an absinthe spoon in the window of an
antique shop. The slotted, sieve-like device was an essential part of the
ritual of preparing the drink: You placed a sugar cube on the spoon and
slowly poured cold water through it to dilute the strong liqueur. Breaux
started stockpiling absinthe accessories, but this proved to be a
frustrating tease. "It was like having a pipe but nothing to
smoke."
So Breaux decided to make some himself. He found a French-language history
book with "pre-ban protocols," a vague description of how
absinthe was made back before it was outlawed. Armed with the protocols, he
prepared a batch in the lab. The result? "Not very good," he
concedes. "I couldn't imagine that being the most popular liqueur in
France."
He got his chance to taste the real thing in 1996, when a friend spotted a
bottle marked "old French liquor" at an estate sale. They were
asking $300, and Breaux, seeing it was a vintage Spanish Pernod Tarragona
absinthe, immediately wrote a check. When he got it to his lab, he plunged
a syringe through the cork, extracted one precious sip, and downed
it. "It had a honeyed texture, distinct herbal and floral notes, and a
gentle roundness uncharacteristic of such a strong liquor," he
says. "Those protocols were crap."
Breaux wasn't the only one rediscovering the long-banned beverage. In
Europe, food regulations adopted by the EU in 1988 had neglected to mention
absinthe, and when they superseded national laws, the drink was effectively
re-legalized. New distilleries were popping up all over Europe, selling
what Breaux dismisses as "mouthwash and vodka in a bottle, with some
aromatherapy oil." Absinthe had disappeared so completely for so long
that no one knew how to make it anymore. Including Breaux, who continued
trying to reverse engineer it in his lab.
The new absinthes became popular among hipsters, just as the drink had been
125 years before. But now the presence of thujone was a selling
point. Marilyn Manson boasted of recording an album while "on"
absinthe. Johnny Depp compared its effects to marijuana. "Drink too
much," he said, "and you suddenly realize why Van Gogh cut off
his ear."
This wasn't just idle celebrity conjecture. In a 1989 Scientific American
article, an American biochemist named Wilfred Arnold hypothesized that Van
Gogh's insanity (acute intermittent porphyria, he speculated) was caused by
the thujone in absinthe. Based on the description of raw materials used to
make the liqueur, Arnold calculated that the thujone content was a
dangerous 250 parts per million. "I would advise not drinking
it," he says.
Breaux rejects Arnold's methodology. "He didn't take the effects of
the distillation process into account," Breaux says. "He made a
WAG - a wild-assed guess." Breaux wanted to settle the thujone
question once and for all. And he was uniquely positioned to do
so. "Back when the original was around, they didn't have any decent
analytical chemistry. And when Arnold performed his research, he didn't
have any samples of the original liqueur. I have both," he says.
At the EASI lab, Breaux ran tests on the pre-ban absinthe samples, as well
as on samples spiked with thujone (from the very bottle I had
sniffed). This allowed him to isolate the toxic compound. He spent his free
time studying the test results, and late one night in June 2000 he had his
answer. "I was stunned. Everything that I had been told was complete
nonsense." In the antique absinthes he had collected, the thujone
content was an order of magnitude smaller than Arnold's predictions. In
many instances, it was a homeopathically minuscule 5 parts per million.
Breaux went public with his findings, but not in a peer-reviewed scholarly
journal. "Here I am with just a bachelor's in microbiology. I knew I
could be tarred and feathered." Instead, he posted his test results in
the discussion threads at La Fee Verte, an online gathering place for
absinthe geeks. Flame wars erupted, and Breaux cited his research to
buttress his point about thujone concentrations. The site's moderator
eventually dubbed him "elite absinthe enforcer."
Breaux's conclusions were vindicated in early 2005, when a food-safety
group working for the German government tested pre-ban absinthe. Dirk
Lachenmeier, who ran the study (called "Thujone - Cause of
Absinthism?") concluded that absinthe is not any more harmful than
other spirit drinks. But the biggest vindication came at the Absinth des
Jahres contest in 2004, for which expert judges sampled newly distilled
absinthes from all over the world. A little-known candidate,
Nouvelle-Orléans, garnered perfect scores and won a gold
medal. "Without doubt, the release of Nouvelle-Orléans was a milestone
in the history of modern absinthe," says Arthur Frayn, one of the
judges. The distiller? Ted Breaux.
"You can read a paragraph or two on how to make wine, but that doesn't
mean you're going to make Chateau Latour," says Breaux. "What
I've done is, I've made a Chateau Latour." In the process of proving
that absinthe wasn't insanity-inducing poison, he had cracked its
code. He'd sourced the concentrations of all the herbs it contained and
even traced them to their original regions of cultivation. He knew
precisely which classes of wine spirits those herbs were combined
with. Making and marketing his own brand was the next logical
step. "Nouvelle-Orléans is part vintage absinthe, part Ted Breaux, and
part New Orleans flair," he says.
Nouvelle-Orléans is just one absinthe formulation Breaux has mastered. He
also makes re-creations of pre-ban bottles. He shows me one that he just
distilled, based on an Edouard Pernod absinthe, and I'm dying to taste
it. Breaux begins to prepare it in the traditional French manner, a process
as intricate as a tea ceremony. First he decants a couple of ounces into
two widemouthed glasses specially made for the drink. A strong licorice
aroma wafts across the table. Then he adds 5 or 6 ounces of ice-cold water,
letting it trickle through a silver dripper into the glass. "Pour it
slowly," he says. "That's the secret to making it taste good. If
the water's too warm, it will taste like donkey piss."
The drink turns milky, and a condensate floats to the top. This is called
the louche, a word that's come to mean "disreputable." Breaux
hands it to me and tells me there's no need to stir away the louche or add
sugar to an absinthe this fine. I take a sip. The flavor is subtle, dry,
complex. It makes my tongue feel a little numb.
"It's like an herbal speedball," he says. "Some of the
compounds are excitatory, some are sedative. That's the real reason artists
liked it. Drink two or three glasses and you can feel the effects of the
alcohol, but your mind stays clear - you can still work."
Breaux is on his second glass, and I'm still finishing my first as he
brings me up to speed on the latest developments in his ongoing absinthe
detective story - if most of the thujone isn't present in the drink, where
has it gone? "My initial estimation was that it's left behind in the
distillation process. But now, I think it probably evaporates out of the
Artemisia absinthium when it dries," he says.
I take a few swallows from my second glass of the 140-proof liquor with
increasingly unsteady hands. "Americans drink to get drunk,"
observes Breaux. "Whereas in France, getting drunk is just a
consequence of sampling too much wine you really like." I'm starting
to feel very, very French.
In between hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Ted Breaux went back to New
Orleans. He snuck past two police checkpoints and into the Gentilly Terrace
neighborhood to survey the damage to his home. Its contents were destroyed,
and it reeked of sewage and rot. The house will need to be
bulldozed. Breaux says he won't rebuild on that spot, which is 8 feet below
sea level. But neither will he flee the city where his family has lived for
200 years. "I just don't know what's going to happen next."
One thing Breaux knows is that his work with absinthe will go
on. Nouvelle-Orléans is distilled in France and sold only in
Europe. Absinthe is still illegal in the US under FDA
regulations. ("But American connoisseurs are able to find it," he
says cryptically.) Breaux supervises its production in the small Loire
Valley town of Saumur, at a beautiful old distillery with ironwork by
Gustave Eiffel and 125-year-old absinthe-making equipment. He struck a deal
with the Combier family, which owns the factory. "I said, let me
distill here, and I'll help you create new liqueurs," Breaux says.
Later this year, the partners will release their latest innovation - a
liqueur made from tobacco. Specifically, a strong, spicy strain of tobacco
called Perique, which Breaux claims is the world's rarest commercial
crop. "It's grown on one 15-acre plot in south Louisiana, near
Convent." Tobacco beverages are tricky to prepare - and even more
scarce than absinthe. After all, as Breaux explains, "nicotine is
toxic if it's ingested."
Contributing editor Brian Ashcraft (brian_ashcraft@wiredmag.com) wrote
about the film Sin City in issue 13.04.
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