The Absinthe Forger

Now in paperback: an astonishing true crime story about an eccentric grifter who blew up the lucrative black market for vintage bottles of the legendary drink of artistic renegades, absinthe . . .

Thought to be hallucinogenic and banned globally for a century, absinthe is once again legal and popular. Yet it is still associated with bohemian lifestyles, just as when it was the favorite drink of avant-gardists like Toulouse-Lautrec and Van Gogh and Baudelaire. And today, when vintage, pre-ban bottles are discovered, they can sell for exorbitant prices to private collectors. But such discoveries are increasingly rare.

Which is why the absinthe demimonde of rich collectors was electrified when a mysterious bon vivant claimed to be in possession of a collection of precious, pre-ban bottles.

Is his secret tranche of 100-year-old bottles real? And just who is the shadowy person selling them? And what about rumors of another secret cache, hidden away in an Italian palazzo?

Journalist Evan Rail sets out to discover the truth about the enigmatic dealer and the secret stashes. Along the way, he drinks with absintheurs frantically chasing down the pre-bans, visits modern distillers who have seen their status rise from criminal bootleggers to sought-after celebrities, and relates the legendary history of absinthe, from its birth in Switzerland through its coming of age in France, and on to its modern revival."Along with the promised detective story, a lively stand-alone seminar on temptation — as well as the culture and history of the much-maligned liquor and its reputation for causing madness and murder." — The New York Times

“An absorbing tale of obsession and chicanery.” — The Wall Street Journal

“A well researched exploration of worlds unknown—including online absinthe communities, secretive worlds of distillers, an online bitcoin ransom and how counterfeit profits may be lavished on purchasing antique classic cars.” — Forbes

“I’ve been reading Evan Rail’s dispatches from Central Europe for years. He possesses a wide-ranging intellect, deep knowledge of the region and a storyteller’s gift for unrolling a complicated tale in a way that keeps the reader hanging on every word. He also knows more than a few things about spirits — I look to him to keep me in the know about Europe’s fast-changing distilling culture. To me, the idea of an Evan Rail book on absinthe — and an absinthe forger, at that — is a slam dunk. It’s a great story, but more importantly, it’s an opportunity for Evan to relate a rich and compelling history about a still- mysterious spirit.” — Clay Risen, NYT staff writer and author of Bourbon: The Story of Kentucky Whiskey

“Evan Rail is one of the world’s most celebrated absinthe raconteurs. The study of pre-ban absinthe is his métier, and in the case of his forthcoming book, The Absinthe Forger, Evan reveals this swindle as only the best gumshoes can: by knowing their quarry from the inside out.” — Warren Bobrow, absintheur/cannabis alchemist

"Evan Rail follows the trail of a clever and creative fraudster in The Absinthe Forger, an engrossing true crime story. . . . The Absinthe Forger is the bracing true story of a much-maligned spirit and the counterfeiter who turned its mythic status to his own ends." — STARRED review in Foreword Reviews

“The cultural history of absinthe, via an audacious contemporary fraud. . . . An entertaining survey of spirits culture past and present.” — Kirkus

"Aficionados of pastis, ouzo, modern absinthe, and other such libations will learn a lot here about the ancestral archetype of contemporary anise-flavored drinks." — Booklist

“Evan Rail is a most exotic rarity in the overpopulated world of food, drink, and travel writers: an unimpeachable authority on his subject who is also a consummate raconteur. A natural-born obsessive (I’ve never known a more contagiously joyous one), Rail has a nose for story equaled only by his nose for strong spirits — and with this tale, hoo boy, he’s found both in spades. I’d read pretty much anything under his byline, but this is clearly the book he was born to write. I can’t wait to get my hands on it.” - David McAninch, author of Duck Season: Eating, Drinking, and Other Misadventures in Gascony, France’s Last Best PlaceEvan Rail writes about food, drink, and travel for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Condé Nast Traveler, Saveur, and others. His monthly “Free Pour” column at the popular site VinePair has been nominated for the International Association of Culinary Professionals Awards. Rail has appeared on numerous television programs, most notably showing Anthony Bourdain around the world of Czech food and drink on the television show “No Reservations.”He was a clever man, charismatic and handsome, a lone figure passing through life like a shadow through cold water.
 
Things were going exceptionally well. His career was sailing forward. Along the way, it was fine to have a little fun, to mess with those who thought they knew more than you did. And all he was doing, really, was putting new spirits into old bottles. To do that, you had to have a keen visual understanding of how a vintage absinthe bottle is supposed to appear, honed by years of collecting and studying the rich history and culture of the drink. Even more important was the ability to identify hundreds or even thousands of distinct aromas that intermingled and overlapped within the bouquet of a hundred-year-old absinthe. And then, you needed the ability to taste: to read and interpret a liquid just like some people read books, feeling and understanding the viscosity and relative acidity of the spirit in much the same way that a careful reader senses the texture and thickness of paper, while also interpreting, identifying, and internalizing its flavors and aromas, just as the eye follows curls and spots of ink that swerve into letters before becoming words, which turn into sentences, and thus convey sense and meaning.
 
He had those skills, and many more. What was important, however, was that the others didn’t. They didn’t know. They couldn’t taste. Their sense of smell was blunted, as if they’d never gotten over a bad cold, as if they’d never even fully been born, staying forever embryonic—piles of unrealized potential, all of them. They didn’t understand how the world worked. They didn’t understand how things were supposed to look, or even know the most basic history of a subject they claimed to love.
 
They were, in a word, dumb. And he was not.
 
"
 
The first version was just to see if he could do it, if he really had those skills. He had been part of the absinthe world long enough to have tasted dozens of samples from the golden era of absinthe, before it was banned in most countries in the lead-up to World War I. (In most countries, but not all: an important distinction.) He’d watched his friends share updates of stumbling across an unopened bottle of C. F. Berger at an estate sale, or an old Pernod Fils in the back of a dusty antique store, and he’d tasted many of the finds they’d shared. There were new makers, too, some of whom were quite good, turning out spirits that had much of the character of the drink that had attracted so many of his literary and artistic heroes: Rimbaud, Van Gogh, Degas, Manet, Picasso, Hemingway, and others. He enjoyed the new versions, especially considering their affordability and availability—even with all the money in the world, it’s not easy to find century-old bottles of the absinthe favored by Toulouse-Lautrec, for example. And while the better new producers from Switzerland and France were hardly stocked in every corner store in his part of London, you could at least order them without too much trouble.
And yet there was something different about historic absinthe, beyond its age, beyond the fact that you were aware, while drinking it, that this very spirit might have been drunk by Charles Baudelaire or Oscar Wilde, that this very bottle might have been held to the frilly breast of a can-can girl at the Moulin Rouge or touched by the hand of Gauguin. Beyond the frisson of their time-shifting possibilities, the old absinthes simply tasted different—oxidized a bit, of course, hinting of old cardboard or a hot, stuffy room, but shifted along the flavor spectrum in other ways, too. Even the best new absinthes seemed to be missing something at the center, an obvious hole where their hearts should be. Žufánek’s Ancienne and Rossoni’s Italienne were good, even delicious, and yet somehow both fell short of what they aspired to be. Each spirit set up expectations that it didn’t fulfill, as if a consumer products company had started out by publishing its brand book, and then launched its first products in the wrong colors.
 
How could you make the modern Italienne taste more like a vintage Pernod Fils? What was it missing? Less fennel, more anise, or the other way around? More presence, or more austerity? What did Ancienne have that l’Italienne didn’t? What about a Swiss bleue, or a Spanish Pernod from the 1950s? How could you combine them, and in what ratio, to get a drink that tasted like history?
 
"
 
It was history, in part, that had originally attracted him to the spirit, well over a decade earlier, though that had come at a moment when absolutely everything seemed new and quick, a period of a hot few years that in his memories still seemed like a constant dawn. At the time he was a university student in a sleepy, second-tier city in England. Someone came back from a trip with a bottle of Czech absinthe—semi-contraband at the time, although the drink had technically never been banned in the United Kingdom. There was a swirl of rumor and innuendo around it, he knew, a cloud of romance, thanks to its association with writers and painters. In the university’s fine arts program, it seemed like you were supposed to be familiar with those artists—with all artists, really—and their dissolute lives before you’d even seen their work. It was expected, he sensed, that a student aiming for a fine arts degree should know about absinthe, and he’d never even tasted it. No one there had. Nor had anyone even seen a bottle for most of a century. And yet by the start of 1999 it was suddenly not just available, but almost ubiquitous—vivid, bright green bottles of Hill’s Czech “Absinth,” spelled without the final E, poured over sugar cubes and lit on fire, the sickly blue-green flames drowned like heretics under a spray of water.
 
It was something, sure, but it felt artificial and wrong, from the mangled spelling on the label to its sudden trendiness, to say nothing of its bright green color and method of serving. If absinthe was part of a seedy, underground culture, why was a mainstream newspaper like the Times running articles about its popularity in the shiniest bars in London? If it was truly a complex, mind-expanding drink which could inspire artistic reverie, why did it taste so simple and crass, so coarsely bitter and astringent, leaving such a strong burning sensation on the tongue? Where was the liquid inspiration that had fueled the imaginations of Toulouse-Lautrec and Picasso?
 
There was a hint of it, a trace of the perfume of a disappeared friend, in the bright-green, no-E “absinth” he’d tasted, but the real thing was clearly hiding somewhere else.