Two Leaves and a Bud

  Two Leaves and a Bud

Darjeeling is known for its Single Tea Estate, unblended and unflavored. With characteristic brightness frequently likened to newly minted coins, fragrant aromas, and sophisticated, complex flavors—delicate, even flowery (more stem than petal, as one expert blender put it), with hints of apricots and peaches, muscat grapes, and toasty nuts—it’s the world’s premium tea, the “champagne of tea.”

Darjeeling tea is often sold not just by single estate like wines, but also by flush, or harvesting season, a term nearly exclusive to tea from the far northeast of India. The fresh shoots from each bush are picked—or, more properly, plucked—every week or so from mid-March to mid-November, as they gradually progress through a quartet of distinct seasons, beginning with first flush in spring and ending with autumn flush. While Darjeeling tea’s unique brightness and aromatic flavors set it apart from other similar types of tea, each of the four periods produces a tea with distinctive characteristics.

Today tea is grown in forty-five countries around the world and is the second most commonly drunk beverage after water. It’s a $90 billion global market. Until just a few years ago, India was the world’s largest producer of tea. Although overtaken by China, it still produces about a billion kilograms—more than two billion pounds—a year.

Tea can generally be classified in six distinct types: black, oolong, green, yellow, white, and pu-erh. All come from the same plant. The difference lies in processing. Nearly all of India’s is black tea, which means that the leaves have been withered and fermented and certain characteristic flavors allowed to develop. (Green tea is neither withered nor fermented, and oolong is only semifermented.) Yet the wide geographic and climatic range of India’s tea-growing areas, from lowland jungle to Himalayan foothills, means that it produces a variety of distinctive black teas.

Darjeeling has only eighty-seven tea estates. Together they have just 19,500 hectares (48,000 acres) under tea. That’s not much; Queen Elizabeth II’s Balmoral Estate measures the same amount. They produce only a fraction of the world’s tea, and less than a single percent of India’s total. Yet the tea from that limited crop is the indisputable jewel in India’s tea-producing crown, its most iconic brew, and the flag-bearer of Indian teas abroad. Here, ecology, history, tradition, culture, and terroir come together to create a sublime product with an unduplicable essence.

Specifically, Darjeeling tea is orthodox black tea. The leaves are withered, rolled, fermented, and fired in the traditional method. Orthodox now implies premium teas that have been hand-plucked and hand-processed.

But more than 90 percent of the world’s (and the majority of India’s) black teas are produced by a method called CTC (cut, tear, curl). In the mid-twentieth century, with the growing popularity of tea bags, a new way to process leaves was developed that made it more convenient for filling the small sachets as well as brewing a quicker, stronger liquor—the name for the infused liquid. Instead of rolling and twisting the leaves, a machine chops and cuts them into small pieces with blades revolving at different speeds.

The result is chocolate-brown granules of tea, even and pebbly rather than wiry and twisted like orthodox leaves. While CTC teas are easier and less expensive to produce, they don’t have a wide spectrum of flavors. Tasters look for color and strength, something known in the industry as “good liquoring.” The best way to assess is by adding a dash of milk to the cupped liquor. The drops disappear into the dark brew before blooming up and turning the tea a flat, slate brown.

Darjeeling has poise rather than the bounce of other Indian black teas, patience over velocity, and, like the finest female vocalists, can carry body as well as subtlety and grace. Its quiet, unadulterated elegance lingers on the palate.

 India is a tea-drinking country. But it hasn’t always been that way, or even for very long.

But such statistics don’t apply to Darjeeling. Around three-fourths of Darjeeling tea is exported to some forty-three countries.

Darjeeling tea is the choice of the global connoisseur—and the well-heeled. At the upmarket Parisian tea purveyor Mariage Frères, arguably the world’s greatest tea store, with six hundred varieties of tea from thirty producing countries in heavy tins lining the walls, the most expensive in the shop (excepting some gimmicky green teas crafted with gold) is a summer-flush Darjeeling. At the poshest places for afternoon tea in London—the Dorchester, the Langham, Claridge’s in Mayfair, and even the Ritz, with five sittings a day, booked months in advance, jacket and tie required for gentlemen—Darjeeling teas are highlighted on the menu and recommended by tea sommeliers.

Perhaps most tellingly, it fills, insiders whisper, the most selective, discerning teapots of all: those in Buckingham Palace.

 

Darjeeling tea’s story is romantic. Like all romances, it has a strong element of improbability, even randomness, to its beginnings, with false starts, near misses, and plenty of luck along the way to the plant’s finding its perfect home. The story is rich in history, intrigue, and empire, in adventurers and unlikely successes, in the looming Himalayas and drenching monsoons, in culture, mythology, and religions, in ecology, and even opium. All these elements have contributed to making Darjeeling’s tea unique.

But Darjeeling’s tea estates are also based on a system of farming that has become untenable. The future—the present, even—of India’s most famous export is under serious threat.

Especially when it takes a staggering twenty-two thousand selectively hand-picked shoots—just the tender first two leaves and a still-curled bud—to produce a single kilo of Darjeeling tea.

And that kilo of tea can sell for more than many months of wages.

This is far from the industry’s only pressing challenge, though. Can Darjeeling’s tea gardens, part of India’s living heritage, survive the area’s separatist unrest, which is pushing violently for independent statehood with protests that shut down the hills for weeks at a time? Or the unprecedented pressure on its fragile ecosystem and changes in climate? The monsoons have become stronger and less predictable and are often bookended by severe droughts. Temperatures have risen. Hail the size of baseballs can pile up three feet deep in a single storm. Soil erosion is a severe issue, and landslides a yearly problem, sweeping away fields, roads, and bridges, even small villages, and swaths of tea estates. Even stable land is problematic. The soil is depleted, many tea bushes are old and dying, with little replanting in the last decades. Recent harvests have yielded only half of what they once did. “Counterfeit” Darjeeling tea, produced elsewhere and mislabeled, has flooded the market.

So this is the story of how Darjeeling came to produce the highest-quality tea leaves anywhere in the world, and how it spiraled into decline by the beginning of the twenty-first century. It’s also about the radical measures being taken to counter the multitude of challenges and save India’s most exclusive and iconic brew. The most revolutionary among them is not based on technological advances or automation but ancient practices grounded in three-thousand-year-old Hindu scriptures.

Tea is more than merely a drink—it’s a soother and an energizer, a marker of time and a measure of it, present at the most quotidian moments of daily life and at the most special. It seeps into life, and sustains it.

And at its source, the world’s most celebrated tea is more than just any crop—it’s the history and politics of India and Britain, the legacy of colonialism, the rise of global commerce and worker aspirations, the perils of climate change, and much, much more, writ large, and brewed into one glorious cup of amber liquid.