GREEN GOLD.(Ted Breaux and absinthe)

By Ted Breaux's estimate, there are only a few dozen people alive who have had the opportunity to taste authentic absinthe, the drink whose notoriety defined the Belle Epoque and which has been banned in many countries for almost a century. It is a number that he is determined to increase. On a crisp, clear fall morning, he greeted me at the Combier distillery, in Saumur, in France's Loire Valley. It is here that Breaux, a thirty-nine-year-old environmental chemist from Louisiana, is trying to reverse-engineer absinthe, precisely as it was made a hundred years ago.

In the near-distance, the towers of Saumur's castle rose above the slate roofs of the town like an image from a medieval Book of Hours. On the street outside, a pair of young men in military fatigues and black berets cycled past before disappearing into the dressage yards of the adjacent Cadre Noir, the elite equestrian academy that has taught the French cavalry since the eighteenth century. Across the way stood the commandant's house, an elegant Second Empire building cordoned off from the street with pink and red roses.

Like the castle and the Cadre Noir, the distillery, whose interior was designed by Gustave Eiffel, is a survivor from an earlier age. Breaux refers to it as "the Temple," and, as he took me past pallets of empty bottles and a row of potted lemon trees, there was certainly a resemblance to sacred architecture: one of the region's Romanesque chapels, perhaps, with their pale limestone walls and vaulted ceilings. The narrow doorway was surmounted by a rose window, and graceful arched windows ran along one wall beneath a steep slate roof. Instead of incense, the air was heavy with the aromas of anise, fennel, and lucerne and the sharp tang of alcohol. Breaux was preparing to distill a batch of his Verte Suisse 65, one of three absinthes that he makes based on vintage recipes.

The distillery was built in 1834, and though various features have been added, all its significant equipment predates the twentieth century. "It's an anachronism," Breaux said. Inside, it looks like something from a Jules Verne novel. A spaghetti tangle of pipes and tubes emerges from two rows of bulbous copper alembics that line the walls on either side. The stills were acquired in 1920, after the breakup of the Pernod Fils absinthe distillery in Pontarlier, in the French Jura, once the center of the absinthe industry. The Combier distillery is, literally, a museum; Breaux, who distills there every few months, has access to it in return for a small commission on every bottle he produces. During distillation, an occasional group of tourists wanders through, admiring the alembics. When I visited, sacks of herbs were stacked in every available space; there was a container of grape alcohol the size of a small car, and an electric pump. Near the entrance stood an immense plastic tub of wormwood, absinthe's distinctive and contentious constituent, which, since the late nineteenth century, was held to cause insanity. Down the center of the room, suspended fifteen feet above the floor, ran a wrought-iron passerelle, or walkway, whose lacy gold-and-maroon ironwork clearly bore the signature of Gustave Eiffel. Since Combier began operating, techniques of distillation have moved on to embrace new technologies such as mechanized mixing and electronic temperature and pressure controls. But obsolescence is precisely what Breaux wants.

Breaux seems an unlikely man to revive a drink with such a fearsome reputation. Amiable, muscled, and bespectacled, he is a picture of wholesomeness. His hobbies include sports-car restoration and the reworking of vintage-guitar circuitry. He has been nominated to be president of a society dedicated to the restoration of Marshall Bluesbreaker amplifiers. Among his published work is an article on Rickenbacker guitars called "Putting the Jangle Back in the Jingle." Breaux was dressed in jeans, a T-shirt, and a weathered leather jacket, one of the few items he had managed to salvage from his house, in New Orleans, destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. He had left the city the morning before Katrina hit, taking with him a guitar, some vintage firearms, and a collection of hundred-year-old absinthes.

Breaux was born in New Orleans, which is also where the earliest American cocktails, like the Sazerac and the Hurricane, originated, and the only place in the United States where absinthe was ever really popular. In the French ...