A Pontarlier partnership that became a family name.

The house of Émile Pernot belongs to Pontarlier, the town in the French Doubs that the company calls the historic cradle of absinthe. Its own website dates it to 1889. The regional heritage inventory of Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, in a dossier written by Raphaël Favereaux in 2016, gives a more detailed account: the business was founded on 14 May 1890 as Emile Pernot et Cie, when Emile Ferdinand Pernot went into partnership with the brothers Eugène and Adolphe Parrot. The Parrots had themselves taken over, in 1889, a business founded in 1879 by Henri François Duval in Pontarlier’s former Augustinian convent.

The partnership did not last. According to the inventory, the three men’s association ended on 25 September 1892, and on 2 February 1894 Emile Pernot founded a new company under his own name. In 1900 the distillery settled in the “maison Laroche” on rue de la Loge, also called rue des Augustins, after a favourable opinion from the local health council. Around 1905, the inventory says, it had a single still of 631 litres and made 400 to 500 hectolitres of absinthe a year. In 1907 it moved again, to rue du Mont — today rue du docteur Grenier — into premises that had belonged to the Deniset Jeune distillery.

The name is easily confused with another. Pernod, spelled with a d, is the name of the absinthe house of Henri-Louis Pernod, whose Maison Pernod Fils built a distillery in Pontarlier in 1805, English Wikipedia says; Pernot, with a t, is a separate family business, and the two should not be mixed up.

From absinthe to anise, in a former car factory.

France banned absinthe in 1915, a ban repealed in May 2011, according to English Wikipedia, and Pontarlier’s distillers had to find other products. The company says that, like every distillery in the town, it had to stop making absinthe, and that its answer was its own anise aperitif, Vieux Pontarlier. It describes Vieux Pontarlier as a distilled anise rather than a blend, and says the recipe it uses today remains faithful to its first distillations after 1915. The inventory gives a slightly different emphasis: around 1920, it says, Emile Joseph Pernot, Emile Ferdinand’s son, began making anise aperitifs and set up at number 13 rue des Lavaux, before acquiring premises on the quai du Doubs.

The business became a limited company, the société anonyme Emile Pernot, in 1931. In 1935 Emile Joseph’s four children took it over under the name Les Fils d’Emile Pernot, “the sons of Emile Pernot,” which the company still uses. Their next move took the distillery into a former factory. The southern part of the former Zedel works in Pontarlier — a factory built between 1903 and 1905 for a motorcycle-engine and then car maker, which closed at the end of 1929 — was acquired by the Pernot business, perhaps during the Second World War, the inventory says, and the distillery restarted there in 1946.

Inside the old car factory, the brothers Roger-Emile and Georges installed a washing and bottling line, vats and tilting stills. The business was later run by Gérard, Roger-Emile’s son, and sold its anise aperitifs under several names, including “Un Emile” and Vieux Pontarlier, according to the inventory. It began making absinthe again in 2001. The inventory adds that the old firm ceased its activity in 2005, and that the business was bought and moved in 2009; part of the old Zedel workshops, including the section the distillery had used, was demolished around that time and replaced by a supermarket.

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.

An absinthe house in a former town hall.

The 2009 move took the business just outside Pontarlier, to Le Frambourg in the commune of La Cluse-et-Mijoux. Its new home was itself an old absinthe distillery. The inventory traces the building to the absinthe maker Berthelot et Cousin frères, founded in 1886, which became Cousin Jeune under Ernest Cousin in 1896; Cousin built a steam distillery on the site between 1898 and 1902. After the business failed following the First World War, the building was sold in 1919 and bought by the commune the next year, serving as town hall and post office. Les Fils d’Emile Pernot bought the whole building in 2009 and moved in that August, the inventory says.

When the inventory recorded the site in 2016, the distillery employed six people and worked with two stills, of 250 and 1,000 litres, made by the Paris firm Anciens Établissements Egrot et Grange; it held the Entreprise du Patrimoine Vivant label, the French state’s “living heritage company” distinction. The company’s website dates those stills to 1905. It also presents the house as a gathering of several old names from the Haut-Doubs: alongside Émile Pernot, it says it carries on the work of the Marcel Michel distillery of Chapelle-des-Bois for fruit eaux-de-vie and gentian, and of Deniset-Klainguer, dated by the company to 1867, for its fir liqueur. Its range has included the absinthes Bourgeois and Vieux Pontarlier, anise aperitifs and gentian aperitifs such as La Gentiana.

The latest chapter came in 2026. The distillery at La Cluse-et-Mijoux had been placed in judicial liquidation, and on Tuesday 19 May 2026 the commercial court in Besançon approved its takeover by Distillerie Guy of Pontarlier, the regional news site maCommune.info reported; the deal kept the business’s last four jobs and its historic brand. Laurent Féry, Guy’s president, told the site he wanted to keep some of the products going and preserve the know-how, describing the business as “un bel héritage régional,” a fine regional heritage. 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 visitors should go to Guy’s premises on rue des Lavaux in Pontarlier; its online shop remains open.

For a design guide, Émile Pernot shows how a family name can carry a Pontarlier distillery through a ban, a car factory, a former town hall and a change of owner. Compare Pernod, the other Pontarlier absinthe name, and Vieux Pontarlier, the house’s anise aperitif. For this guide we use fir green, wormwood and cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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