L’Entêté: The Word That Had to Be Made Legal Again

For most of the twentieth century, a distiller in France could make an absinthe and could not call it one. The liquid was permitted. The word was not.

Recovering the word took two separate changes to French law. The distiller who pursued them named the resulting bottle after the effort.

The Word Before the Ban

Absinthe as a commercial category begins at a specific address. In 1798, Daniel-Henri Dubied set up a distillery in Couvet, Switzerland, together with his son and his son-in-law, Henri-Louis Pernod. In 1805 Pernod left to open his own distillery across the border at Pontarlier, in France.

The plant is older than the trade. Artemisia absinthium, grande wormwood, was used medicinally long before it was distilled commercially, and it remains a bittering agent in vermouth-style wines.

What turned absinthe into a mass product in France was partly circumstance. From the 1860s, phylloxera destroyed a large part of the French vineyard. Wine became scarce and expensive. Absinthe was made from grain spirit rather than grapes, cost less, and was considerably stronger. It moved into the space wine had left. Military consumption and aggressive marketing also contributed, so the vineyard collapse is best read as one cause among several rather than the whole account.

By the 1860s the category had acquired a name for a time of day. Parisian usage called the early evening l’heure verte, the green hour, generally from around five o’clock. The term is recorded in Alfred Delvau’s 1862 study of the city’s cafés.

The reversal is equally documented. Switzerland voted to ban absinthe in 1908, with prohibition taking effect in 1910. The United States restricted it in 1912. France banned it by the law of 16 March 1915. What disappeared was not only a product but a word.

What “La Fée Verte” Carries

The nickname la fée verte, the green fairy, outlasted the ban.

It is frequently credited to Oscar Wilde. That attribution does not survive checking. The phrase belongs to nineteenth-century French popular usage and points most directly at the colour, which in traditional production comes from a second maceration that draws chlorophyll out of the herbs. Wilde drank absinthe and is associated with several remarks about it, but the best known of those was published after his death, in someone else’s memoir of his conversation. He did not coin the name.

The correction matters for the same reason other corrections in this series do. A named author is easier to repeat than an anonymous popular usage. Easier is not the same as accurate.

Two Legal Changes, Not One

Franck Choisne, who took over Distillerie Combier around 2000, began working on the legal position of absinthe in 2004. In 2006 he was awarded a Cuillère d’Or at the Absinthiades in Pontarlier.

The legal work happened in two stages. They are often compressed into one.

The first concerned composition. A French decree of 1988 restricted the use of fennel in the category, which made it difficult to reproduce nineteenth-century formulations accurately. Choisne has described changing that decree as the first fight, undertaken so that historic absinthe could be made properly in France.

The second concerned the name. A separate provision prohibited the word “absinthe” on French labels. That restriction was lifted in 2011, effective 18 May.

The producer’s current materials and Choisne’s own account place their emphasis differently. The house presents 2011 as the year the word came back. Choisne describes the fennel decree as the earlier fight and, for production, the more consequential one. Both are supported by the record. They are not rival versions of a single event but descriptions of two events. For Choisne’s project the order mattered: the earlier change concerned what could be made, the later one what could be printed.

A Plant That Came With an Address

Combier’s absinthe is built around a wormwood that did not come from a catalogue.

Choisne has described obtaining wild grande wormwood originating in the Jura, where the species grows natively, and propagating it at Saumur. The propagation method is the detail worth holding onto. He has stated that the plant was multiplied by mass selection rather than clonal selection.

That difference is not decorative. Clonal propagation reproduces a single genotype and produces a uniform field. Mass selection maintains a population with variation inside it, and therefore variation in the aromatic compounds the plants carry. Choosing the second method means accepting less predictability in the raw material in exchange for a broader range of aromatic variation.

Choisne’s stated reason is that this Jura population carries a minty character alongside the bitterness common to the species, and that he has not encountered it elsewhere. Whether it is unique in the strict sense cannot be confirmed from outside the house. What can be confirmed is the decision itself: a Jura population propagated in a way that preserves variation rather than removing it.

The remaining botanicals are sourced rather than grown, among them green anise from Spain, petite wormwood from Italy, hyssop, lemon balm and peppermint.

Naming a Bottle After the Obstacle

In 2012, the year after the labelling restriction was lifted, Combier released a green absinthe coloured by chlorophyll drawn from the herbs. It was called L’Entêté, the stubborn one.

The name records a process rather than a flavour. It refers to the eight years between the start of the legal work in 2004 and a bottle that could finally state what it was.

What the Rule Now Measures

Absinthe could return because the question changed. It stopped being whether the plant is dangerous and became how much of one compound is present.

Thujone, a constituent of Artemisia absinthium, is limited under European law. Regulation (EC) No 1334/2008 sets a maximum for beverages made with Artemisia species. The figure usually cited for this category is 35 mg/kg, although published sources differ between mg/kg and mg/L; the annex itself should be consulted before the number is used in commercial material.

The practical consequence is that compliance is now established against a documented limit. For the trade, that replaces a historical argument with a specification, which is the more useful thing to be able to state.

It is worth being exact about what this does not establish. A defined limit describes what a producer may not exceed. It does not make a spirit something to be recommended on health grounds, and the modern regulatory position supports none of the nineteenth-century claims made in either direction.

Absinthe did not return because opinion softened. It returned because a composition rule was rewritten, a labelling rule was repealed, and a limit was set that could be tested for.

The name on the bottle records what that required.

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Source note: Dates, the regulatory sequence and production details were checked against Distillerie Combier’s current materials, Franck Choisne’s published statements, and independent references for the history of the category. Where the producer’s presentation and Choisne’s own account emphasise different stages of the legal change, both are given rather than merged. An award attributed to this bottle in material circulating outside the producer could not be located in Combier’s own documentation or in the competition’s published results, and has been left out. The thujone figure is given with its unit flagged for the same reason. The nickname la fée verte is widely credited to a single author; that attribution is not supported by the record and is treated here as popular usage.

This article presents the history, production decisions and regulatory context of Distillerie Combier’s absinthe for educational purposes. It is not intended to advertise alcoholic beverages or encourage their purchase or consumption. It is intended for readers aged 20 and over.

บทความนี้นำเสนอประวัติ แนวคิดด้านการผลิต และบริบททางกฎหมายของแอบซินธ์จาก Distillerie Combier เพื่อการศึกษาเท่านั้น มิได้มีวัตถุประสงค์เพื่อโฆษณา หรือส่งเสริมการซื้อหรือการบริโภคเครื่องดื่มแอลกอฮอล์ บทความนี้จัดทำขึ้นสำหรับผู้อ่านอายุ 20 ปีขึ้นไป