Sunday, March 02
It was tough waking up this morning but I needed to get up and go. With a train ticket purchased last night, I was able to catch the train out of Geneva and my friend picked me up with her car. Why the rush? We had quite a ways to go to our destination of the Val-du-Travers and the reservation was for 10:30AM. "It's a hundred and seventeen kilometers to Couvert, we've got a full tank of gas, half a pain au chocolat, it's overcast, and we're wearing sunglasses. Hit it."
The car ride was a great French workshop, working especially on the difference in pronunciation between "la valée" et "le canton de Valais". It's a subtle distinction, one I'm apparently capable of speaking but it's hit-or-miss on my accuracy rate. "La valée" is in line with other words like café, allez, etc. while Valais is akin to valet, serrait, etc. It must've been pure torture for her to listen and correct me as we churned through sentences like "Je prendrai un café dans la valée du Valais pendant je mets mes clés avec le valet"😅
We made a quick bathroom stop at the train station of Noiraigue. This quiet little town had a nice station and and perfectly kempt soccer field.
Wow, I wouldn't have guessed it but this bathroom was equipped with card/epayment only. 1CHF to get in. The setup is similar to the free toilets I'd seen in France but I suppose this was just a little bit nicer/cleaner.
For 1CHF, it's all the bathroom you can eat! The buttons are light switches, which I thought was a neat choice. Fewer things left unsealed so you can just pressure wash the whole place from time-to-time.
I spotted this weird fruit on the way back to the car. I've no idea what it is.
We eventually turned the corner and entered the Val-du-Travers. This part of Switzerland is colder than many of its surrounding parts; just the effects of the mountains on this valley. And just in time; our 10:30 appointment at an absinthe distillery was about to start. Sure, 10:30 is a bit early to start drinking liquor but in my defense, it was the only time offered by the proprietor when I asked about reserving.
The store was very homely, lots of memorabilia associated with the region and absinthe paraphernalia. I was partly surprised to see that two other people had reserved for the talk, tour, and tasting but their presence was welcome. We were all directed to some comfy seats in the corner where our host brought over a basket of an herb (grand artemesia) and tasked us with pinching the herb to get a sense of its smell and then, with the essence still on our fingers, touch our tongues one time. Why only one time? Because the bitterness of the herb quickly coated my tongue and settled in at the base of my mouth, yikes!
From there, he began his spiel about the history of absinthe. Looking back on this, I wish the sofa I'd sat on had a seat belt because this was a white-knuckle ride for me. Accroches-toi! He spoke French very quicky and energetically, so I think I grabbed 90% of the sense of what he was saying; however, things were moving so fast that I couldn't afford to do a deeper analysis. In a way, it's calculus class all over again 😂So I apologize for any mis-remembering or missing details, here's what I captured to the best of my francophone ability:
- A variety of herbs native to the Val-du-Travers can be used for absinthe but fennel, anise, and I didn't catch the third are the basis.
- Absinthe has been in the region for a long time, traditionally it was made by women; before modern medicine, absinthe was often treated as a curative agent.
- The area frequently traded control between France and Prussia.
- When it came to taxing, producers found it easier to simply buy taxed alcohol and make the absinthe by extracting flavors (similar to how gin is done).
- When drinking quality alcohol became a commodity, the French beverage company Pernod set up shop nearby. In its heyday, >20,000 L of absinthe were produced a day.
- Absinthe's popularity skyrocketed when phylloxera hit Europe, almost wiping out the wine industry completely. To fill the gap and thirsty gullets, bars and influentials began drinking absinthe. It was significantly cheaper than the increasingly rare bottle of wine.
- Absinthe can contain a very small amount of a neurotoxin from wormwood; however, dosage makes the poison and you'd likely die of alcohol poisoning long before feeling the wormwood. Still, a recovered wine industry was more than happen to drum up fear and lobby the government to ban their competition.
- People in the Val-du-Travers continued to make their traditional beverage on the sly. The ban was on making, selling, and transporting absinthe, it wasn't a crime to drink it 😂
- In 2005, Switzerland lifted the prohibition and our host quit his job in the petrol industry to try his hand at artisanal absinthe.
It's time to put an end to the green fairy!
Next was a tour of the still shop: it was a very small set up, most still were small to make them easier to cover up if the police came snooping around. Since absinthe starts from drinking alcohol, the operation is purely for extraction of flavor oils: this means that contact of solvent with the dried herbs followed by flash distillation to leave behind solids and residue is the name of the game. The anethole (an aromatic compound) doesn't play nicely with water and will turn the solution cloudy if you have too much water, but assuming you had your ratio right to start with, that shouldn't be an issue. As a pure distillate, absinthe is colorless; IF you want green absinthe (chasing that green fairy), you'll want to macerate some of your herbs to get more flavor and chlorophyll and blend that into your distillate. Then fill bottles and slap some labels on; bing, bang, boom, you got absinthe.
I was surprised to find the distillery just in the backroom of the shop; I don't know how they got the permit for this considering there's 1600 gallons of 96% ethanol sitting in these bulk containers next to propane fired still pots.
Some absinthe paraphernalia. I suppose some of the craftspeople must've gotten carried away with their towers and sugar spoon but I think the world is a richer place for it.
Artemisia / wormwood is actually a pretty little plant.
Fortunately, the history and touring had taken about 50 minutes, so by the time we started the tasting it was almost 11:30; a much more respectable time for drinking booze. We tried 4 items from the distillery: two blue absinthes, a green, and then an absinthe cream. The famous absinthe tower played a key role in our tasting: filled with ice water, you add water to your glass to reach an 11% drink. It was only for the green absinthe that our host got out the spoon and a sugar cube, primarily to counteract some of the extra bitterness in the digestif. The cream was basically a coffee creamer with a hint of anise.
All in all, I was very pleased with my absinthe tasting adventure and I came with a couple bottles to take home as souvenirs. We also received a great recommendation for a lunch place not too far away. Driving through Switzerland reminded me a bit of driving through the SW of France, some of the lesser roads and smaller towns were wide enough for ~1.5 cars. I also noticed a bunch of red wooden posts framing the small roads as we wove through farmland to the restaurant, she remarked that the posts indicate where the road is when everything is obscured by snow. The restaurant itself was very cute: a rustic little farmhouse with wooden furniture, game trophies overhead, a long-haired cat patrolling outside, and friendly servers. There were a couple of older couples enjoying absinthe with their meals, as evidenced by the water towers and cloudy glasses.
un tuerie
It was udderly ridiculous coming back from a men's restroom decorated like this to discover that the meal came with a salad course. I was informed that in this region (or at least establishment), it is traditional for a man to toss the salad. Stifling back an adolescent giggle, I had the privilege of explaining the connotation tossing a salad has in American slang. But hey, when in Rome, it's best to do as the Romans do, right? I mean, it'd be rude not to. Je suis obligé!
When explaining the menu, the waitress described the jambonneau as a "tuerie". I didn't catch this word on the first pass so my friend explained that a tuerie is an incident of multiple people being killed (I'll add sarcastically that it's a useful word for an American to know). In effect it translates as "a mass killing" but in French, "le jambonneau, c'est un tuerie" means [the jambonneau is to die for]. Also, I expected a ham steak and was very surprised when a pork knuckle came out.
After lunch we made our way to a little hiking spot, the Creux du Van. A seemingly hollowed section of a plateau, the Creux du Van is an impressive bowl of cliffs with a shaded forest inside. From the plateau, we had an excellent view of the Alps out past the lakes to the east. In terms of hike difficulty, we didn't traverse very far nor climb much elevation, but the snow on the ground kept us conscious of our footwork.
We pushed our luck by skipping past the first parking lot but eventually called it quits at an empty spot and walked the remaining km to the trail start. Fortunately, the snow meant we weren't lacking for things to look at.
The dark side of the tree.
Oh, it's a big horseshoe.
It's pretty neat to see the layers of rock slope up, meanwhile, we had to ensure we didn't slip down.
I wonder what caused all of these trees to be curly.
Just over the lip of the creux [~hollow], we could spot the Alps.
As if on cue, a big cloud plowed straight into the hollow and quickly kept moving east over the plateau.
You ever just look out there somedays and ask yourself, "what if"?
The plateau was transformed in an instant as the cloud consumed us.
We kept spotting weird snow/ice effects in this area. This snow feather I think was caused by snow and wind while other needle/woodchip like bits of snow were the result of snow getting blown onto tree branches and then falling down in clumps.
More of the Jura mountains of to the SW and further into France.
Behold, the Swiss and French Alps! Underneath that sea of clouds in Lake Neuchatel and Fribourg.
In the back, to the right, one can just make out the profile of Mont Blanc!
The creux is still impressive from this angle too. It's a shame we didn't have longer till sunset, doing a whole loop around this place would a great summer hike. Maybe snowshoes and a few extra hours could've made it a plausible option for the day, but I'm content with what I got.
Maybe this is gentian? The barren stalks just poking of the ground caught my attention.
All in all, I recommend a visit to the Creux du Van but it's a very out-of-the-way destination. In theory, I could have arrived via train and bus, but that would've been very tedious and time consuming. Perhaps most impressive is the extent to which Switerland's rail and transit system is connected; even a small little town in the Val-du-Travers had a functional rail station that could get one to a medium-sized hub town quickly. On the other hand, the trains in Switzerland as expensive. My public transit travel this weekend cost me 100 CHF. Turns out, I shouldn't have simply ignored the promotional pricing the SBB app kept taunting me with while purchasing my tickets: there's a half-price card one can buy from SBB that reduces all ticket prices by 50% for the rest of the year. Since I'm likely to buy more rail passes/tickets over the next two months, perhaps I should look into this as well as research a bit more into ticket options.
Descending back towards the train station, getting ready to plunge under the surface of the sea of clouds.
Mont Blanc getting ready for bed.
My friend had made a funny comparison between surfers walking through Biarritz with their surfboards compared to skiers roaming the streets of Geneva with their gear. 😂
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