Few drinks have a reputation like absinthe.
Banned in some countries for almost a century, the drink was supposedly a source of madness and crime, even blamed for artist Vincent van Gogh chopping off his ear.
Author and absinthe aficionado Evan Rail says there's a lot of bluster around the drink, but that doesn't make its history any less interesting.
The "green fairy", this liquor of choice for Belle Époque bohemians, is a drink of "romance and mystery", the author of The Absinthe Forger tells ABC Radio National's Late Night Live.
And since absinthe has become once again legal and available in most places, the controversies haven't stopped.
'A cultural phenomenon'
Absinthe is a potent alcoholic beverage made from different plants, including the flowers and leaves of a herb called grand wormwood, or artemisia absinthium.
Part of the drama surrounding absinthe comes from the fact that wormwood contains a tiny amount of a neurotoxin called thujone.
Thujone can be harmful to humans, and countries have regulations about how much is allowed in food and drink.
"[But] there isn't enough thujone in a couple of bottles of absinthe to poison a person. You're not going to get thujone poisoning from too much absinthe. You're going to get alcohol poisoning," Rail says.
The anise-flavoured, traditionally green drink was first produced in Switzerland during the late 18th century and, like many other alcohols, was initially used as a medicine.
By the 19th century, its popularity as a drink boomed around Europe, especially in France.
"Absinthe was a cultural phenomenon … There was even a time of day dedicated to absinthe, 'the green hour'. At around 5pm, people broke from work and had their first absinthe of the day," Rail says.
The drink was particularly loved by artists, writers and other creative minds, and it soon became synonymous with French bohemian culture.
"It was known as the green fairy — or la fée verte in French," Rail says. (One of its most famous recent on-screen incarnations was portrayed by Kylie Minogue in Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge).
Absinthe was not only a part of creatives' lives, it also featured in their artworks, from In a Café (The Absinthe Drinker) by Edgar Degas to Pablo Picasso's The Glass of Absinthe.
It was said to have hallucinogenic properties that could spur creative genius but may also plunge an individual into depths of insanity. This was all very overstated and largely incorrect, Rail says.
Instead, absinthe leads to "a state of reverie", he says.
"It inspires a lot of really good daydreams … You think about the past, but you can also think about the future."
Moral panic around absinthe
By the late-19th century, France was in the midst of an identity crisis.
The French Empire had waned. It had lost the Franco-Prussian war. The economy was in tatters.
"People were talking about the decline of French civilisation," Rail says.
On top of this, society was modernising and changing. New art and new thought confronted old minds. And not everyone was happy with this new France.
"As society was changing, people tried to find … something to blame, and they picked the green fairy. They picked absinthe."
Ostensibly, absinthe started to get banned because it contained thujone. But it "was banned also because people were looking for something to demonise", Rail adds.
"This was a moral panic at the end of the 19th century."
"Absinthism" was seen as a separate scourge to alcoholism, and it was linked to a number of gruesome crimes.
In 1905, a farmer in Switzerland murdered his family. He was an alcoholic, who, at the time, had drunk many different types of alcohol, including absinthe. But the absinthe was singled out.
Soon after, absinthe was banned in many parts of Europe and the United States.
Lifting the bans
Absinthe bans were in place from the early 20th century to the early 21st century.
But its eventual acceptance was tied up less in a grand fight for the green fairy and more in not-very-bohemian trade and capitalism.
Absinthe was never banned in Czechoslovakia (which today is the Czech Republic or Czechia and Slovakia), Rail explains.
When the Czech Republic joined the EU in the early 2000s, absinthe started to be exported to the UK.
Rail says this created an absinthe "boom" there, with the drink once again seen as fashionable.
"[So] the Swiss re-legalised absinthe in 2005, and the French a couple of years later, along with the Americans."
The absinthe underground
After nearly a century of illegality and with its connections to some of history's greatest artists and writers, absinthe has an outsized reputation and allure.
Contemporary absinthe-makers are now creating new versions of the old classic, especially around Europe.
Rail says that even though today's absinthe is largely the same as what people drank historically, a small group of people want to get their hands on a bottle made before the bans of the early 1900s.
"It is certainly special to drink something that is not just the same brand of spirit that Picasso drank, but you can actually drink the same bottling, the same batch," Rail says.
Alternatively, you could drink a batch favoured by Oscar Wilde, Ernest Hemingway or Charles Baudelaire.
"It's like you're time-travelling to the 19th century," Rail says.
"And that inspires people to track them down ... and share them in these little secret groups in this underground community, or keep them to themselves."
This small European community of absinthe lovers — or absintheurs — will sometimes chip in together to get a bottle which may cost around USD$5,000 ($7,600).
Then, it's bottoms up.
"With relish … they open these bottles and share them at their little soirees and underground meetings and drink it."
However Rail found out that not all of these bottles are what they seem.
The absinthe forger
Absinthe continues to stir up controversy to this day.
For his book, Rail entered the world of absinthe connoisseurs and was made aware of a fraud in the community.
The absintheurs alerted Rail to a man, identified by the author only as "Christian", who they suspected was peddling new absinthe as pre-ban absinthe.
It was only picked up due to the keen eyes and taste buds in this underground community.
"They had started to realise that some of these samples seemed a little off, maybe they weren't correct in some way, in terms of the packaging," Rail retells.
"Some people could see a bottle from across the room and say, 'That's not right because the label had been placed at the wrong height on the bottle'."
Rail says the community eventually uncovered around €100,000 (or $161,000) of fraud.
He says that the evidence was overwhelming, and the forger later confessed and apologised.
But there was one complication in potential prosecution — the evidence was mostly all gone.
"It's hard to prove that there is a crime that actually occurred, because in most cases the evidence — that is the absinthe itself — was consumed."
A 'real joie de vivre'
After spending time in Europe's underground absinthe community, Rail feels torn about one thing: What should be done with the diminishing pre-ban bottles of absinthe that still exist?
"I'm of two minds. I really think these things should be preserved … The number of bottles that were created before 1914 is limited. They're disappearing."
But seeing how the absintheurs consume the historic drink made him realise another point.
There's a power in "being able to take something like that and enjoy it now, having that sense of the present", he says.
"It shows a real joie de vivre, that I find really admirable."
