Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic

So, a couple of months ago I read a New Yorker article about an American chemist, T. A. Breaux, and his personal obsession with re-creating the forbidden liqueur absinthe. Not only did he move to France, purchase antique distillation equipment and then reverse engineer the recipes from preserved bottles of 100-year-old hooch, but he was determined to see the results of his labor marketed and sold. So after resolving a precarious issue regarding legality—the drink has been banned in France since World War I—Breaux set up shop on the web via a London-based intermediary. Due to an odd legal loophole, the online sale of absinthe is rather like offshore gambling. Basically, it’s illegal to sell the stuff in the states, but not particularly illegal to sell from overseas to U.S. customers. My bottle arrived in five days from a London address, with the “contents” field of the shipping label marked “documents”. It was not cheap, but time travel back to the Belle Epoque probably shouldn’t be; after all Degas, Baudelaire, Van Gogh and company did become rather famously unhinged on the stuff. Just the same, vive le Internet yet again, for delivering me from the limitations of the ordinary.

http://vintageabsinthe.com/

Daniel Turman