thelovingspoonful.net

This is a New York Times article that I have been holding onto for awhile now. I had originally planned to feature it as a transition from tea time back out of wedding week, but in the midst of some last minute emergencies, I completely forgot.

“High Tea, India Style” is an older article that is part of the Times’ Frugal Traveler section. In this piece, writer Matt Gross makes a pilgrimage to India in search of some of the world’s finest tea. He delves deep into tea culture in this area, and is surprised to learn that it is not much different from ancient wine culture in Europe or the larger Asian continent. The article gets off on a slightly slow note, but really picks up and is down right funny by the half point.  Tea lovers and adventurous wanderers should both check out this article!  (I skipped a small section between the excerpts, so make sure you catch it.)

HIGH TEA, INDIA STYLE

A daily sampling is ready for tasting at the Makaibari Tea Estate

High Tea, India Style
By Matt Gross

“THE Himalayas rose almost out of nowhere. One minute the Maruti Suzuki hatchback was cruising the humid plains of West Bengal, palm trees and clouds obscuring the hills to come; the next it was navigating a decrepit road that squiggled up through forests of cypress and bamboo. The taxi wheezed with the strain of the slopes, and the driver honked to alert unseen vehicles to our presence — one miscalculation, one near miss, could send the little car over the edge and down thousands of feet, returning us to the plains below in a matter of seconds.

The cypress-dotted grounds of the Goomtee estate

For an hour or more, as we climbed ever higher, all I saw was jungle — trees and creepers on either side of us, with hardly a village to break the anxious monotony. Finally, though, somewhere around 4,000 feet, the foliage opened just enough to allow a more expansive view. From the edge of the road, the hills flowed up and down and back up, covered with low, flat-topped bushes that looked like green scales on a sleeping dragon’s flanks. Tiny dots marched among the bushes and along the beige dirt tracks that zigzagged up the hillsides — workers plucking leaves from Camellia sinensis, the tea bushes of Darjeeling.

Tea pickers at the Glenburn estate

Flying to a remote corner of India and braving the long drive into the Himalayas may seem like an awful lot of effort for a good cup of tea, but Darjeeling tea isn’t simply good. It’s about the best in the world, fetching record prices at auctions in Calcutta and Shangha, and kick-starting the salivary glands of tea lovers from London to Manhattan.

In fact, Darjeeling is so synonymous with high-quality black tea that few non-connoisseurs realize it’s not one beverage but many: 87 tea estates operate in the Darjeeling district, a region that sprawls across several towns (including its namesake) in a mountainous corner of India that sticks up between Nepal and Bhutan, with Tibet not far to the north.”

Women sort varieties of tea at the Glenburn Tea Estate

“The men who run the estates are royalty — and they know it. When visiting their domains, you are at their disposal, not the other way around. At times, this can be frustrating; at others, delightfully frustrating.

I my first such encounter — the latter sort — at Makaibari, an estate just south of the town of Kurseong, around 4,500 feet above sea level. Founded by G. C. Banerjee in the 1840s, during the region’s first great wave of tea cultivation, Makaibari remains a family operation, run by Banerjee’s great-grandson Swaraj — better known as Rajah.

Rajah is a Darjeeling legend: He’s arguably done more for Darjeeling tea than anyone else in the district. Back in 1988, he took the estate organic; four years later, it was fully biodynamic, the first in the world.

Today, it produces the most expensive brew in Darjeeling, a “muscatel” that sold for 50,000 rupees a kilogram (about $555 a pound, at recent exchange rates of around 41 rupees to the dollar) at auction in Beijing last year. You won’t often spot his logo — a five-petaled flower that resembles the underside of a tea blossom — on grocery store shelves, but you’ll find his leaves in boxes marked Tazo and Whole Foods.

As with wine, tasting tea is no simple process of gulping and grading

After checking into one of the six no-frills bungalows he has erected for tourists, I marched into the Makaibari factory (opened in 1859), climbed the wooden steps to Mr. Banerjee’s office and sat down across the desk from a vigorous patrician with thick gray hair, a clean-shaven angular jaw and black eyebrows in permanent ironic arch. What, he asked, smoking a borrowed cigarette, did I hope to accomplish at Makaibari?

“Well,” I began, as the smell of brewing leaves wafted in from the adjacent tasting room, “I guess I’d like to see how tea is made.”

“Ha! You’ve come to the wrong place for that,” Mr. Banerjee declared with an eager grin. “This is the place to see how tea is enjoyed!”  Read more

*Images courtesy of Jehad Nga and The New York Times