Explaining some of the mysteries of absinthe

A delightful explanation from Evan Rail as he explores the original distillery homes of absinthe - the spirit banned for a century throughout Europe but now back on sale and increasing in popularity.

On the Absinthe Trail - NYTimes.com:

A friend in Prague had started hosting upscale absinthe tastings at a bar there last summer, including several of the new — or renewed — versions coming out of France and Switzerland. Although both countries had banned the drink about 100 years ago, following widespread panic about the hallucinogenic and deleterious effects of absinthe, production was legalized again in Switzerland in 2005, followed by France in 2011. After a century, people no longer seemed to fear the Green Fairy, and the growing popularity of cheap, inauthentic absinthes from countries where the drink had never been banned — primarily the Czech Republic — put pressure on authorities to lift the ban in absinthe’s traditional homelands.

After sitting in on one of my friend’s tastings, I found myself unable to stop thinking about the complexity of the drink’s anise aromas, the starkness of the bitter herbs on the tongue, and deeply disappointed that I couldn’t find anything similar, not even at the city’s best bottle shops. (And though I certainly didn’t hallucinate, I missed the pleasant dreaminess the drink seemed to evoke.) As I began reading more about absinthe, I discovered that some of the most highly praised versions came from the Val-de-Travers. Indeed, it turned out that the area and the nearby province in France even had something called la route de l’absinthe, or absinthe trail, a semi-organized list of attractions related to the drink: distilleries, museums, restaurants and destinations like the Fontaine Froide. 

"Absinthe Antiques: a Collection From la Belle Époque"