We arrived one evening to find Michel behind the bar, presiding over an informal degustation. Seven or eight different brands were being put through their paces by the local enthusiasts, some of them brands I had never seen.
A pastis tasting is not the hushed, almost religious ritual that you might find in the cellars of Bordeaux or Burgundy, and Michel had to raise his voice to make himself heard over the smacking of lips and the banging of glasses on the bar.
“Try this,” he said. “It’s just like mother used to make. It comes from Forcalquier.” He slid a glass across the bar and topped it up from a sweating metal jug rattling with ice cubes.
Good grief. This is what mother used to make? Two or three of these and I’d be lucky to make it upstairs to one of the bedrooms on my hands and knees. I said it seemed strong, and Michel showed me the bottle: 45 percent alcohol, stronger than brandy, but not above the legal limit for pastis, and positively mild in comparison with one that Michel had once been given. Two of those, he said, would make a man fall straight backward with a smile on his face, plof! But it was something special, that one, and I gathered from Michel’s half-wink that it was not altogether legal.
He left the bar suddenly, as if he’d remembered a soufflé in the oven, and came back with some objects that he put in front of me on the bar.
“Do you know what those are?”
There was a tall, spiral-patterned glass on a short, thick stem; a smaller, chunky glass, as narrow as a thimble and twice as high; and what looked like a flattened tin spoon decorated with symmetrical rows of perforations. On the stem just behind the flat head was a U-shaped kink.
“This place used to be a café long before I took it over,” said Michel. “I found these when we were knocking through a wall. You’ve never seen them before?”
I had no idea what they were.
“In the old days, all the cafés had them. They’re for absinthe.” He curled an index finger around the end of his nose and twisted, the gesture for drunkenness. He picked up the smaller of the two glasses. “This is the dosette, the old measure for absinthe.” It was solid and tactile, and felt as heavy as a slug of lead when he passed it to me. He took the other glass and balanced the spoon on top of it, the kink in the stem fitting snugly over the rim.
“Bon. On here”—he tapped the blade of the spoon—“you put sugar. Then you pour water over the sugar and it drips through the holes and into the absinthe. At the end of the last century, this was a drink very much à la mode.”
Absinthe, so Michel told me, was a green liqueur originally distilled from wine and the wormwood plant. Very bitter, stimulating and hallucinogenic, addictive and dangerous. It was 68 percent alcohol, and could cause blindness, epilepsy, and insanity. Under its influence, Van Gogh is said to have cut off his own ear, and Verlaine to have shot Rimbaud. It gave its name to a particular disease—absinthisme—and the addict would quite often “casser sa pipe” and die. For this reason, it was made illegal in 1915.
One man who would not have been pleased to see it go was Jules Pernod, who had an absinthe factory at Montfavet, near Avignon. But he adapted to the times by changing his production over to a drink based on the legally authorized anis. It was an immediate success, with the considerable advantage that customers would live to come back for more.
“So you see,” said Michel, “commercial pastis was born in Avignon, like me. Try another one.”
He took a bottle of Granier from the shelf, and I was able to say that I had the same brand at home. Granier, “Mon pastis” as it says on the label, is made in Cavaillon. It has a more gentle color than Pernod’s rather fierce greenish tinge, and I find it a softer drink. Also, I’m inclined to support local endeavors whenever they taste good.
The Granier went down and I was still standing up. To continue my first lesson, Michel said, it was necessary to try another, a grande marque, so that I could make a considered judgment across a range of slight variations in taste and color. He gave me a Ricard.
By this time it was becoming rather difficult to maintain a detached and scholarly attitude to the comparison of one pastis against another. I liked them all—clean-tasting, smooth, and insidious. One might have had a drop more licorice than the rest, but the palate develops a certain numbness after a few highly flavored and highly alcoholic shots. It’s a pleasant numbness, and it stimulates a roaring appetite, but any traces of critical appraisal I might have started with had vanished somewhere between the second and third glasses. As a pastis connoisseur, I was hopeless. Happy and hungry, but hopeless.