Darjeeling

by Jeff Koehler

  To Tod Nelson, for years of friendship and reading early drafts

  Contents

  Two Leaves and a Bud

  First Flush

  1. Into the Hills

  2. Journey from the East

  3. The Company

  4. An Indian Tea Industry

  5. China Leaf

  Second Flush

  6. Darjeeling

  7. Terroir to Teacup

  8. A Decision for the Mouth to Make

  9. Knocking Down

  Monsoon Flush

  10. The Raj in the Hills Above

  11. Nostalgia

  12. Planters and Pluckers

  13. Midnight’s Planters

  14. Crises

  Autumn Flush

  15. Positive Winds

  16. Soil

  17. Celestial Influences

  18. Initiatives

  19. Back down the Hill

  Recipes

  Author’s Note and Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Index

  Plate Section

  Two Leaves and a Bud

  The rows of ceiling fans struggled to cool the raked Kolkata auction room. Their collective whir barely covered the cawing of large crows on the trees outside or the incessant honking horns from black-and-canary-yellow Ambassador taxis moving through the perpetually slow traffic. Nearly two inches of rain had fallen on Friday, and after a relatively dry weekend, drenching monsoon showers returned on Monday, July 14, 2003. It was approaching ninety degrees Fahrenheit, and the humidity stood at over 90 percent. Parts of the city remained submerged knee-deep in water. Dark, spongy clouds hung overhead. Only the lightest of breezes moved in the thick air.

  Tea buyers, agents, exporters, blenders, and “packeteers” had gathered for Sale No. 28 of Darjeeling tea1 on the second floor of Nilhat House, a boxy and bright midcentury midrise shoehorned into the old city center. The building houses J. Thomas & Co., India’s oldest and largest firm of tea brokers and auctioneers.

  Darjeeling is known for its single-estate teas, 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.”

  That day at the weekly event, the auctioneer Kavi Seth thought they might see unusually high prices with the exceptional quality of some of the tea on offer—specifically a lot from Makaibari, one of Darjeeling’s oldest gardens. Since the early 1980s, Makaibari had been under control of Rajah Banerjee, the charismatic, fourth-generation owner, who converted it into an organic oasis with more than half the estate under deep forest cover. He sought exceptional leaf quality through healthy soil and viewed the farm as a complete, self-contained organism. Some buyers considered it to be the finest, purest Darjeeling tea available—with a cosmic edge. Banerjee farms observed wider lunar patterns and planetary rhythms, and the lot in question up for auction that day, christened Silver Tips Imperial, had been picked under a full moon. “If Darjeeling is the champagne of teas,” Time magazine proclaimed in 2008, “Makaibari is the Krug or Henri Giraud.”2

  Seth started with J. Thomas in 1985, had been intimately involved with Darjeeling tea for a decade, and had been in charge of the catalog and auction of Darjeeling teas for the previous two years. While he had tasted tens of thousands of Darjeeling teas, Seth recognized something extraordinary in the Makaibari lot. A decade later he still vividly recalls its “special flavor and quality.” Seth did two things to build excitement. First, he spread the word among buyers. Second, quite extraordinarily, he listed it last in the catalog. Normally the standout teas are toward the beginning and then mixed around. But this would be the day’s final lot and force buyers to stick around until the very end.

  In the crowded auction room, Seth worked through hundreds of lots of teas, coming, at last, in late afternoon, to the anticipated Makaibari offering.

  That midsummer, Darjeeling tea was fetching on average 150.25 rupees per kilo, then worth about $3.25, at the weekly auction, with leaf grades—the highest level—averaging Rs 295.3 (By contrast, the year’s all-India average for 2003 was Rs 77.25.)*

  Yet Seth opened the bidding at Rs 3,000.

  Buyers, perhaps drained from the anticipation and tension, the warm room, and humidity outside, and keenly aware of the significant amount of money they were committing to laying out, slowly countered one another with slightly higher offers under the auctioneer’s nudging.

  Then a new buyer jumped into the bidding. Representing a European firm, he was keen to secure the lot of five small chests of tea. A current surged through the room, and bidding rallied.

  Sitting at a dais in the front of the room, the auctioneer took offers and counteroffers as the amount spiraled aggressively upward by the hundreds of rupees, speeding past Rs 8,000, Rs 10,000, and Rs 12,000. Soon it approached—and quickly shot by—the standing world record of Rs 13,001 for tea sold at wholesale auction that had been set in 1992 by a tea from another Darjeeling estate, Castleton, which abuts Makaibari. A murmur charged through the audience—and then a hush. Everyone was aware of being part of something special. Seth thought he would see a good price that afternoon for the lot, but he hadn’t imagined it would go this high.

  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.

  Makaibari’s stock selling that day had been picked during the prime early-summer second flush, when Darjeeling tea is at its most vibrant. Tea from this flush has a sublime body and pronounced muscatel tones, with a mellowed, intense fruitiness and bright coppery color. “At its best, Second Flush Darjeeling is unquestionably the most complex black tea the world produces,” wrote James Norwood Pratt, one of North America’s foremost tea authorities, “with an everlasting aftertaste it shares with no other.”4 Upward the price climbed, past Rs 14,000, Rs 15,000, and Rs 16,000, demolishing the auction world record. Past Rs 17,000.

  An agent for Godfrey Phillips India, bidding on behalf of a couple of international clients, agreed to Rs 18,000 per kilo ($390.70). The amount was 120 times more than Darjeeling tea’s average and almost 250 times the country’s average for tea at auction. A million rupees—ten lakhs, as they say in India—for the small lot containing fifty-five kilograms (about 120 pounds) of tea. That’s the equivalent of two tea-stuffed suitcases going for more than $10,000 each wholesale.

  The European representative desperately wanted the invoice but had reached his authorized limit. He frantically tried to call on his cell phone for the go-ahead to bid higher.

  Seth asked for takers for a higher bid.

  The European buyer couldn’t pick up a signal. No one else said a word. The crowded room smelled of sweat and tension and humidity. Fans whirled overhead.

  Seth asked a last time.

  In the silent room the agent struggled to get a signal and make his urgent call.

  “Knocking to Godfrey Phillips at eighteen thousand,” Seth finally said, smacking the table with the side of the wooden head of his Raj-era gavel cupped flat in his palm.


  Cheers erupted in the auction room and a ringing round of applause. Seth thanked the buyers and participants—and their appreciation of the tea’s quality. Two of the five chests were destined for Upton Tea Imports in Holliston, Massachusetts, one for Japan, and two to an associate of Makaibari’s.5 The garden had just set a new record for tea sold at wholesale auction.

  “It was a landmark event,” Seth said by telephone from Kolkata. “The record still stands. We are unlikely to see it broken for many, many years.”

  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.6 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.

  A framed Tea Board of India map leans against the wall of Mittal Stores, a cramped, sixty-year-old tea shop in New Delhi’s quiet Sunder Nagar market. Bordered by a braid of blue tea buds and colored in the saturated gold and green tones of 1970s Kodachrome 64 slide film, on the map the country sits raised, like an old-fashioned wooden puzzle piece lifted from its base, in three-dimensional thickness but strangely flat. Green-shaded areas, those with tea estates, stretch across the northeast limb of the country, the spine of hills that rise up in the south, and a handful of other spots in the north. Each place gives a little different character to the final cup, from the full-bodied teas of Assam to those from Nilgiri, which can be wonderfully brisk and aromatic yet carry a certain freshness.

  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.

  “It has complexity with a certain level of intensity,” noted Vikram Mittal on a recent autumn morning in his busy shop. He sipped a small cup of first flush Jungpana, an estate reached by hundreds of steps and considered by many in the industry to be currently producing the best tea in the district. “Complexity and flavor. An aftertaste that stays, that fills the mouth. A whole experience.” Mittal, in his early fifties, thin, with frameless glasses perched on his sharp nose and a graying mustache, retains the enthusiasm and sense of wonder of a young science teacher. “There is complexity with a certain level of intensity. There is that complex aftertaste, that feeling you get afterward,” he said in his quiet voice. “You can see it when you taste it with other teas. When you only drink Darjeeling, it seems nothing special. In the beginning I thought it was a bit of hype. But when I started tasting it with other teas …” He finished his cup of Jungpana and shook his head slightly, still amazed, after all these years, after thousands and thousands of teas, by the flavors that Darjeeling’s hills can produce.

  “You can’t create a flavor,” said Sanjay Kapur of Darjeeling’s fine teas in his Aap Ki Pasand tea boutique, across town from Mittal Stores in Old Delhi. “It’s natural.”

  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 tea is a different ball game altogether,” said Kapur.

  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.

  At Independence in 1947, all but 51 million kilograms, or 20 percent of its total production of 252 million kilograms (555 million pounds), was for national consumption.7 The drink had imperial associations and was even considered unhealthy by some. “The leaves contain tannin which is harmful to the body,” Mahatma Gandhi wrote in his 1948 book Key to Health. “Tannin is generally used in the tanneries to harden leather. When taken internally it produces a similar effect upon the mucous lining of the stomach and intestine. This impairs digestion and causes dyspepsia.”8 Not until the 1960s, with the availability of inexpensive CTC tea, which was well suited to being boiled with milk and plenty of sugar and even spices, did vast numbers of roadside tea stalls appear and the drink become popular within the country. Extremely popular. India consumes more tea that anywhere else in the world, and the drink has become equally a symbol for Indians as for the British. Today about 800 million kilograms (1.75 billion pounds)—80 percent of its total production—is for the local market, a 15,000 increase since Independence.

  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.

  How will Darjeeling tea—one of the
Raj’s greatest legacies—and even Darjeeling itself, a symbol of that era, survive in these high-tech times? Can such traditions resist the riptide of India’s strident economic and cultural changes, its modern ambitions? Can a product that requires such tedious, highly skilled, and lowly paid manual labor continue to exist with the rising role of education and technology? The aspirations of many workers in Darjeeling making less than $2 a day have awoken, inspired, no doubt, by dreams of software firms and Bangalore call centers (or even, more realistically, of being a Mumbai security guard or Delhi housemaid). In just a handful of years, worker absenteeism has shot up from negligible to as high as 40 percent on some estates. Simply put, few want to pluck tea anymore.

  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 landsides 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.