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. Zufánek''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.