The Old Absinthe house – originally called the Absinthe Room – opened in the 1870’s by a Spanish bartender named Cayetano Ferrer. The Old Absinthe house is one of New Orleans’ most prominent historical landmarks, situated as it is on the town’s main thoroughfare, Bourbon Street. The American city of New Orleans also holds a strong connection to absinthe. Spanish drinkers took a liking to absinthe, and the nation is the only one never to have banned the beverage. While the French love affair with la fee verte (“the green lady,” a popular nickname for absinthe) grew, the drink’s notoriety and consumption spread throughout Europe. By 1910, absinthe was by all measures the drink of choice in France, consumed at far greater rates than wine or any other liquor. (known to Americans as the start of “happy hour”) become known as l’heure verte, or “the green hour,” signaling the onward flow of emerald absinthe into the later hours of the evening. Furthermore, there was a massive wine shortage in France during the latter half of the 19th century, which caused absinthe to grow, almost by default, into its role as France’s most fashionable drink.
The troops returned with a taste for absinthe at a time where mass production had dramatically reduced the cost of making and distributing the highly specialized drink. In the 1840’s, French soldiers were given absinthe as a field treatment for malaria. Ordinaire’s wormwood potion, Pernod soon opened a larger distillery in Pontarlier, France, where absinthe would gain its international reputation as the drink of choice for artists, writers, and intellectuals.ĭespite the common association between Bohemians and absinthe, the drink was especially democratic. Five years later, Henri-Louis Pernod, father of the Pernod brand, opened his first absinthe distillery in Switzerland. Legend has it that Ordinaire passed down his absinthe recipe his deathbed. Ordinaire crafted a drinkable concoction using local herbs mixed with Artemisia absinthium, or wormwood, to produce an emerald green elixir rumored to cure everything from flatulence to anemia.
Ordinaire retreated from the French Revolution to settle in the small Swiss town of Couvet. Though the history of wormwood-infused liquor extends back to the days of the Egyptian empire, the credit for what we now know as one of the most infamous beverages, absinthe, goes to a French doctor, Pierre Ordinaire.
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