Absinthe Gets an Image Makeover

By Elaine Sciolino

COUVET, Switzerland -- For three years Claude-Alain Bugnon has competed with his wife for space in the unfinished concrete basement of their home here, she to do laundry, he to make absinthe.

Armed with plastic containers of dried herbs, tubs of pharmaceutical ethanol, a homemade still and a secret recipe from a friend's grandmother, Bugnon has used his skills as an oil refinery technician to produce the powerful herbal elixir long blamed for driving people mad.

In January a new law takes effect in Switzerland aimed at rehabilitating the reputation of absinthe, whose distillation, distribution and sale were banned after an absinthe-besotted factory worker killed his wife and two children nearly a century ago.

The new law will allow Bugnon and dozens of other underground absinthe makers to “come out,” as one Swiss newspaper put it, seek amnesty and produce absinthe legally.

“Absinthe is good for your health and I drink it almost every day,” said Bugnon, filling glasses with his still illegal beverage. “My kids are growing up with its smell. Of course, I still have to be a bit careful. Until the end of the year I could be denounced by an enemy and turned in.”

For Swiss distillers like Bugnon, the goal is to produce top quality, high-octane, government-approved absinthe produced from Artemisia absinthium, or wormwood, a plant native to the Val-de-Travers, the region in western Switzerland where the drink was invented.If all goes well the distillers hope to obtain an official governmental “appellation” declaring that the region produces the only real absinthe in the world. That will secure for them the exclusive right to use the name absinthe --just as the Champagne region of France is the only region in the world by law to produce champagne.

The new law also will help the Swiss cash in on the rising global market for absinthe, which can be bought easily, and often illegally, over the Internet. There are Internet sites offering absinthe recipes and sources for wormwood seed.

In addition to prodigious amounts of alcohol, absinthe contains thujone, a toxic chemical found in wormwood that was used to treat stomach ailments as far back as ancient times but can cause tremors, hallucinations, paralysis and brain damage in large enough doses.Absinthe with a low level of thujone is already sold legally in a number of other countries, including Canada, Germany, New Zealand, Austria, Japan, Sweden, Italy and Britain, but not the United States. The Netherlands lifted its ban on absinthe sales last July.

2004 New York Times News Service