Marketing a Hallucination: The Return of Absinthe
Many years ago, I met a group of people who, having encountered absinthe in Spain and despairing of it's unavailability here in the United States, decided to take matters into their own hands and distill it themselves. The concoction they produced was beguilingly exotic, shockingly potent, and of questionable legality, having been banned here in the United States since 1912.
Well, time changes everything. The European Union has got rid of the various bans against absinthe's production and there are now two brands available in the United States (and many more in the EU itself). Not only that, there seems to be a full-on PR blitz letting everyone know that Van Gogh-esque feelings are just a milky green glass away.
The first story I remember seeing appeared in The New Yorker last year. That article focused on artisans like Ted Breaux who were trying, fairly successfully, to recreate pre-ban absinthe.
More recently, the stream of articles about absinthe has grown steadier. In early November, the New York Times published this giddy column on the "mystique and misery of absinthe." Then, at the end of the month, Time published this article entitled simply, "Absinthe Is Back," and posing the question, "Do you want to party like it's 1899?" Suddenly, you could find locally produced articles on absinthe whether you lived in Raleigh-Durham or in Salem, OR.
Although I'm sure that the PR and marketing folk working for Lucid and Kübler have had something to do with this, it can't hurt the folks like Picasso, Monet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Hemingway, and, uh, Marilyn Manson, have been extolling the virtues of this divinely devilish substance for the last hundred years or so (collectively speaking). I mean, with friends like that, who needs marketers?
Which makes me wonder if there aren't other contraband substances from bygone eras that we could bring back to the market by leveraging their cultural cache. I mean, who couldn't go for a frosty mug of laudanum right now? I mean, if it was good enough for Dickens, Wilkie Collins, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, how could it not be good enough for us?
Image courtesy of spacepleb.
