Before the green fairy: two thousand years of wormwood

In ancient Rome, the winner of the four-horse chariot race on the Capitol during the Latin festival did not get a crown of gold. According to Pliny the Elder, writing around AD 77, he was handed "a draught of wormwood," because "our forefathers were of opinion that good health was the most valuable reward they could bestow upon his skill."

Absinthe takes its name from that plant, Artemisia absinthium, and the plant is far older than the drink. It was a medicine for some seventeen centuries before anyone turned it into the green liqueur of the Paris cafes. The drink itself was born in a Swiss valley in the late 1700s. Who invented it is still argued about, and the version most people know is probably wrong. So is the story of how it got to France, which began as a newspaper writer's guess. The page ends on it.

AD 77: forty-eight remedies

Pliny gave wormwood a chapter of its own in his Natural History: "Absinthium or wormwood; four varieties; forty-eight remedies." The finest, he said, came from Pontus on the Black Sea, where cattle fattened on it. It was "very strengthening to the stomach," and so "wines are flavoured with it." He gave the recipe for a medicine: six drachmae of the leaves boiled with the branches in three sextarii of rain water. Wormwood in wine, for the stomach, is the oldest ancestor of absinthe on record.

The first century: a wine called absinthites

Pliny's Greek contemporary Dioscorides, a doctor whose herbal was copied for the next fifteen hundred years, says the wine already had a name. "A wine called absinthites is also made from it," he wrote, "especially around the Propontis and Thrace," the shores of the Sea of Marmara, and people drank it in summer "believing it makes for good health." His recipe starts with a pound of Pontic wormwood boiled down in grape must. He also says ink mixed with a wormwood infusion "keeps writing from being eaten by mice." Gerard's shrew mouse and sea dragon, below, come from this same chapter.

The 840s: a monk's garden

Walahfrid Strabo, a monk of Reichenau, the island monastery on Lake Constance, wrote a Latin poem about his own garden, bed by bed. Wormwood gets the seventh section. For a pounding head or dizziness, he says, "boil a bitter forest of leafy wormwood," pour the broth from a big kettle over the top of your head, bind the leaves on, and wrap it in a soft band. "After a few hours have slipped by, you will marvel."

The 1000s: wermod, and the chariot race again

An eleventh century English herbal gives the plant the name it still has: "This wort, which is named absinthium, and by another name wermod," grows "in cultivated places, and on downs, and in stony places." Around the same time a Latin herbal poem that went under the name Macer Floridus retold Pliny's chariot race, eight lines of it, ending on the moral that health "is worth more than all the wealth in the world." Macer adds that nobody who takes wormwood in wine before sailing will be seasick, and that a mouse will never gnaw a page written in ink thinned with wormwood wine.

The 1150s: Hildegard's wine

The abbess Hildegard of Bingen opened her chapter on "wermuda" with "Wormwood is very warm and very powerful, and it is the chief master against all exhaustion." Her wine is the closest thing to vermouth in any medieval record found. Pound fresh wormwood, press the juice through a cloth, warm wine with honey and pour the juice in, "so that the juice's taste is stronger than the wine and the honey." Drink it "from May to October," every third day, before eating.

About 1300 to 1491: always chapter three

By about 1300 the herbals of the medical school at Salerno were painting wormwood tall, feathery and blue green, "hot in the first degree, dry in the second." Then came print. The Gart der Gesundheit, printed at Mainz in 1485, gave "Absinthium wermut" its own woodcut and chapter. The Hortus sanitatis, printed at Mainz in 1491, did the same and repeated the old line that the name comes from Pontus. In Macer, the Gart and the Hortus, wormwood is chapter three, after mugwort and southernwood. Fuchs, in 1542, was the one who moved it to chapter one.

1542 and 1597: chapter one

When the German doctor Leonhart Fuchs published his great illustrated herbal at Basel in 1542, the first chapter was "De Absinthio," with full page woodcuts of common wormwood, labeled with its German name, Wermut. That is where vermouth gets its name.

In London in 1597, John Gerard's Herball gave wormwood three pages. Like Pliny, he thought the best grew in Pontus, and he noted a creeping kind growing "in certaine colde countries of Switzerlande." Among its virtues, it "keepeth garments also from the Mothes," it "driueth away gnats," and taken with wine it was good "against the biting of the shrew mouse, and of the sea Dragon."

1737 to 1805: the Val-de-Travers

The liqueur came from the Val-de-Travers, a valley in the Swiss Jura in the canton of Neuchâtel. The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland finds wormwood wine there in 1737 and an "extrait d'absinthe," an extract, by 1769. Its reading of the evidence is that the recipe was probably made or adapted by Henriette Henriod of Couvet, who sold it. The man usually given the credit, a French doctor named Ordinaire who settled in the same village in 1768, it calls the inventor "probably wrongly."

In 1797 Daniel-Henri Dubied, his son Marcelin and his son-in-law Henri-Louis Pernod founded an absinthe distillery at Couvet. In 1805 Pernod crossed the border and opened his own works at Pontarlier, in France. A century later his firm still printed the date on its labels: "Maison fondée en 1805." Couvet kept making absinthe too. When Edouard Pernod of Couvet registered his label in Washington in 1884, it carried the Swiss cross, the Alps and the words "Extrait d'Absinthe."

1889: the army in Algeria

Almost every history says absinthe reached the French public through the army: soldiers in Algeria in the 1840s were given it against fever, came home with the taste, and the cafes followed. Look for where that story starts and it gets thin fast. The earliest version found is from 1889, in a London Telegraph piece reprinted in Kansas. It does not cite anything. It says "the balance of evidence" would "seem to show" that the Algerian campaign had "a great deal to do with the popularization of absinthe," and that "nothing is more probable than that some skillful and kindly military surgeon" prescribed it. That is a guess, and it says so.

Twelve years later the guess had become a fact. A San Francisco Call feature of 1901 had the army doctors ordering troops to take "a few drops in their claret." The same article also told the Henriod legend in its oldest American form: "Its first makers, according to history, were two old crones in the Swiss Mountains," who sold it as a fever cure. By 1901 the two stories were already being told side by side, and neither one named a source.

Wormwood, year by year

Where the sources disagree

Who invented it. Dr. Ordinaire is usually named. The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland leans to Henriette Henriod of Couvet. The records underneath both versions were not reached for this page.

The Henriod sisters. Many books say two Henriod sisters. The 1901 newspaper says "two old crones." The Swiss reference work names one woman.

The army in Algeria. Widely told, never sourced in anything found here. The 1889 version calls it probable, not proven.

Macer's chapter. Some retellings say the medieval herbals opened with wormwood. In the text of Macer it is chapter three, after mugwort and southernwood, and the 1485 and 1491 Mainz books follow the same order. Fuchs in 1542 is the first here to put it first.

Hildegard's wine. Popular accounts call it a spring tonic. Her own text says May to October.

The 1797 and 1805 dates. They come from the Swiss reference work, and Pernod's own 1908 label agrees on 1805. The original founding papers were not seen.