In the spirit of Australia Day, we offer you…

Moulin Rooz 60%

The Australian Vodka Company - Tambourine Mountain Distillery

Reviewed: 26 January 2008

With/without sugar? Both

Reviewed - Robert Maxwell & Jonathan Carfax (Reviews in tandem! How modern.)

According to Aboriginal legend, the first platypus were born after a young female duck mated with a lonely and persuasive water-rat. The duck’s offspring had their mother’s bill and webbed feet and their father’s four legs and handsome brown fur.

-From www.platypus.asn.au

In much the same way that the eurocentric Royal Society gasped in disbelief when New South Wales Governor Captain John Hunter sent a platypus pelt to London, only to have it dismissed as an elaborate hoax - those of us learned absintheurs of French, Swiss or even Spanish tastes may find ourselves perplexed by what is before us.

Moulin Rooz, currently Australia’s only commercially distilled absinthe, really is a surprising creature indeed.

The first thing one notices is the extreme emerald green colour of the raw absinthe, presented in quite a long, nouveau-inspired clear glass bottle with t-cork closure (As it happens, the height of this bottle is it’s undoing in terms of my absinthe collection - it doesn’t fit in my absinthe cabinet. How tiresome. - Robert). The labelling is somewhat “home-spun” reflective of its cottage-industry origins, and features a kangaroo in quasi-fin-de-siecle costume with a bottle of MR and two more stuffed in her pouch.

Given the colour of the absinthe and the clear glass bottle, one immediately assumes that this is an artificially coloured absinthe, which is indeed the case. The label information tells us that:

“Moulin Rooz is Australia’s first premium Absinthe. Five times-distilled from the finest Australian grapes, with perfect balance of Elderflower, Gentian, Fennelseed, Hyssop and Wormwood(thujone), Moulin Rooz is further enhanced with Australian Native Aniseed Myrtle and other selected botanicals. A perfect expression of bitter and aromatic herbs, with hints of the Australian Bush. (Natural herbal particles may be present)”

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Although this absinthe is not in ready commercial distribution in Australia, there is mail order and notable tourist-based personal import, to the degree that the fine folk at the Fischer Schnappsmuseum in Vienna felt it necessary to produce a template customs declaration for Australia to verify that it contained less than the legal 10mg/kg of thujone.

I never got the chance to use this customs declaration when I picked up a bottle in Austria, because those *!@#@-wits at Heathrow Airport and British Airways decided to lose my bags for two weeks enroute back to Australia (despite multiple assurances that the luggage would be on board after missing a connection…look- don’t get me started or I’ll rave on about the pure incompetence of BA…needless to say I am among the thousands who will now refuse to go through that hell hole of a transport hub or travel on that airline).

Anyway, my bags were eventually returned with the absinthe, so fortunately I can bring you my particular thoughts on this somewhat unusual product…

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Kübler 53%

Blackmint Distillery, Motiers, Switzerland

Reviewed: 8 December 2007

With/without sugar? Both.

Kübler 53% is a distilled Swiss La Bleue absinthe, produced in the Kübler ancestral distillery in the Val de Travers, dating to 1864. Interestingly, Kübler was the first absinthe in Switzerland to be produced legally post-prohibition, thanks in part to distiller Yves Kübler’s idea to trademark the word ‘absinthe’, thus allowing him to sell his product as such when others could not. The absinthe is presented in a shouldered olive green bottle with a cork stopper. This cork closure turned out to be more of a problem than one would expect, as the ‘lid’ or external part of the stopper came away from the cork, meaning your taster had the delightful experience of opening his bottle of Kübler with a pair of pliers. Oh, the romance… (If this happens to anyone else, try to avoid opening the bottle with a cork screw, as this perforates the cork totally and may lead to evaporation of your absinthe. However, if you just can’t wait and have the corkscrew at the ready, replace it with a T-cork and make your life much easier in the long run.)

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