How a Pontarlier distillery answered the absinthe ban.

Vieux Pontarlier means “old Pontarlier,” and the name points at a single place: Pontarlier, a town in the Doubs department of eastern France, close to the Swiss border. English Wikipedia records that the Pernod family built a second distillery there in 1805, under the name Maison Pernod Fils, and the town grew into the centre of French absinthe making. VinePair reported in 2019 that in the early 1900s some 25 distilleries in Pontarlier produced a third of all the absinthe made in France.

One of them belonged to the Pernot family. The distillery Les Fils d’Émile Pernot says Émile-Ferdinand Pernot, a distiller from the Fougerolles area of the Haute-Saône, went into partnership with the Parrot brothers in 1889 to found Émile Pernot et Cie in Pontarlier, and that its first label for extract of absinthe, “Absinthe Pernot,” is dated 12 October 1889. The company says the family business later passed to his son Émile-Joseph Pernot and then to the next generation, who traded as Les Fils d’Émile Pernot.

The ban changed what the distillery could make. The company says the prohibition was decreed in France on 7 January 1915 and that Parliament voted the law banning production on 16 March 1915; at the start of the century, it adds, absinthe gave work to nearly 3,000 people around Pontarlier. Like every distillery in the town, Pernot had to stop making absinthe.

Vieux Pontarlier was the answer. The distillery says that rather than give up distilling plants, it created its own anise apéritif after the ban and called it Vieux Pontarlier. The German absinthe retailer absinthe.de dates the anisette to 1925. The company describes it as a distilled anise, led by green anise, and stresses that, unlike pastis, it is distilled rather than blended; it says today’s recipe stays faithful to its first distillations after 1915.

One name, two drinks, two markets.

The name now sits on two different bottles. The first is the anise apéritif. The distillery’s own product pages present it as a page of its history and list it in several versions, green or blue, dry or unsweetened, alongside anise apéritifs sold under its Deniset-Klainguer name.

The second is an absinthe. The Vieux Pontarlier name was given to an Absinthe Française Supérieure, and the Pernot distillery now lists Vieux Pontarlier with Bourgeois as its emblematic absinthes. absinthe.de says the absinthe is made for export while the anisette of the same name continues to be made for the French market, and credits an English company, Liqueurs de France, with long using the Vieux Pontarlier name for an absinthe.

In the United States the absinthe is sold by Tempus Fugit Spirits, a company based in Novato, California. Tempus Fugit says one of its founders created the modern protocol for Vieux Pontarlier Absinthe and had created or co-developed more than 25 European absinthe brands since 2001, and that after the United States re-legalised absinthe in 2007 the company became an independent importer for absinthes from Switzerland and France.

Its description of the drink is specific. Tempus Fugit says Vieux Pontarlier was developed over five years at one of the last two absinthe distilleries still working in Pontarlier, using the distillery’s pre-ban logbook notes and antique alembic stills made for absinthe, and that select botanicals and Pontarlier-grown wormwood are distilled in a chardonnay grape spirit from Burgundy. It lists the absinthe at 65% ABV, or 130 proof. The Pernot distillery says its stills were built in 1905 by the Paris firm Egrot et Grangé.

Tempus Fugit gives the absinthe’s full name as Vieux Pontarlier Absinthe Française Supérieure, joining the town’s name to a French grade of absinthe, and its tasting notes describe a pale peridot green that turns an opalescent white when ice-cold water is dripped in.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all absinthe names: La Fée, Kübler, Jade, Lucid, Émile Pernot, Duplais and Vieux Pontarlier. Between them they run from a Pontarlier distillery that says it first labelled absinthe in 1889 to names launched after the drink became legal again.

Two places sit behind most absinthe stories. One is the Val-de-Travers, a valley in the Swiss canton of Neuchâtel: English Wikipedia records that Major Dubied opened a distillery at Couvet in 1797, and that the village of Môtiers in the Val-de-Travers became a focal point of production after the Swiss ban was lifted. The other is Pontarlier, just across the border in the French department of the Doubs, where the same source records that the Pernod family built a distillery under the name Maison Pernod Fils in 1805.

The bans shaped every brand here. English Wikipedia records that Switzerland held a referendum on 5 July 1908 and that the production and sale of absinthe were prohibited there from 1910 until 1 March 2005. In France, Parliament voted the law banning absinthe production on 16 March 1915, according to the Pontarlier distillery Les Fils d’Émile Pernot; English Wikipedia records that the French ban of 1915 was repealed in May 2011, and that in the United States the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau effectively lifted its long-standing ban in 2007.

A label is therefore often doing more than naming a drink: it is placing it in one of these two places, or in the years before or after a ban. Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — who started the brand, who owns it now, where its absinthe is actually distilled and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A family distillery, new owners and a takeover.

The distillery behind the name has changed hands twice in two decades. The company says Émile-Gérard Pernot, great-grandson of the founder, ran the business from 1979 until he retired in January 2005, when he sold the majority of it to Pierre Beuchet, a négociant from Burgundy. The company says it bought the Pontarlier distillery Deniset-Klainguer in 2006 and the eau-de-vie house Marcel Michel in 2009, and in 2009 moved to Le Frambourg at La Cluse-et-Mijoux, just outside Pontarlier, into the former Cousin Jeune distillery at the foot of the Château de Joux.

The latest change came in 2026. The local news site macommune.info reported on 20 May 2026 that the commercial court in Besançon had on 19 May 2026 approved the takeover of the Pernot distillery, then in judicial liquidation, by Distillerie Guy of Pontarlier, saving its last four jobs and the historic brand. Laurent Féry, president of Distillerie Guy, said he wanted to keep certain products and the know-how behind them. The Pernot website now says the La Cluse-et-Mijoux distillery has closed for good, that Distillerie Guy has taken over its activities, and that the Pernot online shop remains open.

The town’s own name has gained protection too. VinePair reported in 2019 that the European Union had granted Protected Geographical Indication status to Absinthe de Pontarlier after a 15-year campaign. The name needs care in searches: the Vieux Pontarlier absinthe and the Vieux Pontarlier anise apéritif are different drinks, and Pontarlier itself is also the home of the Pernod Fils story told in our Pernod guide.

For a design guide, Vieux Pontarlier shows how a place name, first used to keep a distillery working through a ban, can be carried over to the very drink that ban was aimed at. Compare Émile Pernot, the distillery behind the name, and Duplais, the Swiss absinthe that Tempus Fugit Spirits also sells in the United States. For this guide we use wormwood green, fir green and louche opal with an old-style serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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