P. Duplais and the absinthe “Suisse.”

Duplais is not named after a distillery or a family that made absinthe. It takes its name from a book. P. Duplais was the author of a French manual on making liqueurs and distilling spirits, the Traité de la fabrication des liqueurs et de la distillation des alcools, which the absinthe enthusiasts’ group the Wormwood Society dates to 1855; it hosts an English translation of the work, which it says many consider the official canon of nineteenth-century French distilling practice. English Wikipedia’s article on absinthe cites an 1882 edition of the same treatise.

The manual includes recipes for absinthe, and the brand builds its story on them. The German retailer absinthe.de, which sells the range, says the recipe of Absinthe Duplais is based directly on the protocols for absinthe “Suisse” — Swiss-style absinthe — set out in the treatise, and that its most visible change from the old method is a completely reworked colouring step.

The timing came from Swiss law. Switzerland banned the production and sale of absinthe from 1910, following a referendum on 5 July 1908, and lifted the ban on 1 March 2005, according to English Wikipedia. Duplais was introduced in July 2005, a few months later, absinthe.de says, and the retailer describes it as the first “verte,” or green absinthe, to be released in Switzerland since the ban was lifted — a claim we give as the seller’s own.

Where Swiss absinthe may come from has since been argued in court. In 2010 the Swiss government decided that only absinthe made in the Val-de-Travers, in the canton of Neuchâtel, could be labelled as absinthe in Switzerland; in 2014 the Federal Administrative Court ruled against that decision, English Wikipedia says.

A family distillery in the Bernese Seeland.

Duplais is made in Switzerland by Matter-Luginbühl. Absinthe.de says that Absinthe Duplais is distilled by the Matter-Luginbühl distillery, and its product pages name Oliver Matter as the producer. The distillery is a family business. Its own website describes Matter-Luginbühl AG as a small family company in the Bernese Seeland, “founded in 1920 and today in its fourth generation,” making fruit brandies, bitter aperitifs, liqueurs and absinthes, and names Oliver Matter as the owner. The website’s address, and its shop and Martinazzi-Stübli tasting room, are in Aarberg.

Absinthe.de tells the family story in more detail. It says that in 1928 Ernst Luginbühl-Bögli acquired the recipe for the Italian bitter Martinazzi, that exports to the United States followed as early as 1934, and that in 1947 he bought the Löhr farm, where an old plum variety became known as Löhrpflümli. According to the same account, the second generation ran the distillery from the late 1950s until 1985, when the founder’s granddaughter Elsbeth took over; in 1996 the distillery moved from Aarberg to Kallnach; and in 2005 Oliver Matter and his wife Nicole took it over. The company’s own site gives 1920 as the founding year, and it now gives an Aarberg address; we note both rather than resolve them.

The legalisation of absinthe in 2005 gave the distillery a new line of work. Absinthe.de says Matter’s first absinthe, the Kallnacher, drew its attention, and that Matter has been its main supplier since 2005, making all of the retailer’s own absinthes; it says the two have tested more than fifty recipes together and turned about a dozen into products. Duplais Verte, it says, was the first of them.

Absinthe country.

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 retailer’s brand with artists’ labels.

The brand belongs to a partnership between a distiller and a shop. Lion Spirits GmbH, the German company behind absinthe.de, says its roots go back to 2000, when it began with absinthe.de as a specialist absinthe shop. Together with Oliver Matter, it says, the Absinthe Duplais series was created after absinthe was legalised in Switzerland in 2005; later bottlings it lists include Mansinthe, Brevans, Pigalle and Nouvelle Vague. Lion Spirits is named, with an address in Buggingen in Baden-Württemberg, as the food business operator on the Duplais product pages. The domain duplais.ch, meanwhile, forwards to the Matter-Luginbühl website.

The range has three colours. Duplais Verte is the green absinthe launched in 2005; Duplais Blanche is a clear absinthe; and Duplais Balance completes the set. What sets the brand apart visually is its labels. Absinthe.de describes the Verte as carrying an art label by David Tibet, as part of an “Art Edition.” It says that Steven Stapleton, of the band Nurse With Wound, gave the artwork for the Blanche label, and calls the Blanche the second absinthe in its “Absinthe Art Edition” series; and it says Peter Christopherson gave the artwork for the Balance label. The retailer frames the idea in one line: the combination of art and absinthe, it says, creates a challenging dynamic of past and present.

For a design guide, Duplais shows how a small brand can borrow its name from a historical text and hand its labels to artists. Compare Kübler, another Swiss absinthe brand, and Émile Pernot, a Pontarlier house on the French side of the border. For this guide we use verte green, hyssop and a pale blanche with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Duplais’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.