Darjeeling

by Jeff Koehler

  And so on down the row of cups lined up along the counter, quickly, quietly, gruffly, keeping within the spell of the tasting in an almost hurried sense of trying to hold a complete set of impressions before any distraction can occur and break their imprint.

  Outside the tasting room, Dhancholia is quiet and unassuming, soft-spoken. In a film, he might be cast as a provincial high school music teacher who coaxes greatness from his charges through subtlety, sensitivity, and talent. His physical, almost aggressive style of tasting seems at first out of character, until one understands that the seriousness he puts to the daily task drives him to literally jam his nose into warm leaves and splashing tea. Tasting demands complete focus. He calls the concentration required “a type of meditation.”

  “You need a fresh mind—and a clean tongue,” said Girish Sarda at Nathmulls tea store in Darjeeling. Rajah Banerjee agrees. But you also must be highly practiced. Superior olfactory perception (and recognition) might be inherent in some, but it needs to be honed and cared for through years of repetition. “Because the tongue is a wonderfully sensitive bit of equipment that has many nerves that trigger in us a certain emotional message to the nerve center: sour, sweet, salty, sugary, bitter, whatever. It is a combination of all these sensations that one has,” Rajah said in a 2005 documentary about Makaibari. “So triggering of this abstract emotion instantly needs the fusion of a fine tongue, a palate, a good nose, training for it, and of course the discipline of a good lifestyle.”1

  In summertime he said, “It’s a natural talent that can’t be sullied.” By that he meant personal habits, much in the way an actor cares for the voice and an athlete the body. No chewing betel nut, no gutka (an addictive, powdery mix of tobacco, betel nut, and other flavorings sold in small, silver packets that litter the Darjeeling hills), nor even too much spicy food. Smokers, for Rajah, are hopeless tasters. “Mimics,” he said on a cold autumn evening, scoffing at the number of those who are professionally tasting teas yet carry on with such habits. “We’ve become an industry of mimics.”

  “You can’t make it one hundred percent perfect,” Sanjoy Mukherjee, the production manager at Makaibari, explained during a first flush batch tasting. “But we can minimize the error percentage.” While he reckons that amount is just a single percent, good tasters—he ranks Rajah among the best—can pick out all the faults from rolling, withering, fermenting, and firing.

  The teas aren’t tasted just a single time. It’s essential to sample them at varying temperatures as they cool. Certain tea aromas are volatile and dissipate—“high-strung” Sanjay Sharma calls them. Others hang around, a good sign. “The aroma should intensify as it cools,” Dhancholia said. “As it cools down, if you get the same flavor, then that is best.” In Delhi, Sanjay Kapur, India’s best-known taster and blender, also favors teas with “fixed flavors” that remain as the temperature decreases and the teas grow inward and intense. But his take is more practical, from a merchant’s perspective. These are more desirable because it is realistically how they are drunk, he explained. “Sipped, while talking. Enjoyed.”

  Dhancholia keeps going back to certain cups in the tasting room, slurping and sniffing as he splashes the liquid with a spoon, occasionally curling a hand around the top of the cup so that nothing escapes as he leans down and draws in the aromas. He rechecks the dry leaves and the infusion of the teas he particularly likes—or dislikes. All the while, he is commenting on the teas and asking for certain details from the factory manager.

  Banerjee offers his comments (or commands) in a high, weedy voice in a blend of Bengali and English as he goes back through the teas, slurping and sniffing. “Damn good! Damn good!” he repeatedly marveled about a handful of cups during a first flush tasting with sixteen batch samples lined up. When he considered one anything less, it was immediately obvious to those in the room by his exaggerated grimaces and dramatic spitting of the tea into the gaboon followed by a calflike moan. While Dhancholia and Sanjay might be a touch less theatrical, they are just as demanding.

  Most tasters note the better batches by moving the tasting bowl one position forward or backward like a chess pawn, or even above on the small tile ledge of the window, mixing up the once-orderly line and leaving the tiles wet with splashed tea and stray infused leaves.

  While tasting has a routine and a ritual, it is not fully quantifiable nor scientific. “There is a science to it, yes, but also an art,” said Sanjay Kapur, a round soupspoon in hand. In his late fifties, Kapur is tall, refined, articulate, and well-read, with a penchant for tailored dress shirts and dapper boardroom blazers, and the patient way of listening of a diplomat. He also possesses one of the most discerning palates in the business.

  Kapur gingerly picked up a cup and smelled the aroma before tasting a spoonful of it for the fourth or fifth time. Two wooden trays held porcelain tasting cups partially filled with first flush teas shining greenish gold. He had been tasting that morning, returning to the teas at leisure as they cooled.

  His tea boutique, Aap Ki Pasand, and the offices behind (and above), edge a chaotic jumble of lanes in Old Delhi’s Daryaganj neighborhood not far from the majestic Mughal-era Jama Masjid and Red Fort. Outside, gusts of hot April winds, laden with dust picked up off the parched plains, gave the sky an insulating haze. But once inside, the heat and grit of the old city immediately receded. The quiet inner room—part laboratory, part atelier—acts as Kapur’s work space. Along a counter, old gadgets sit in mugs (magnifying glasses, various thermometers, a small barometer) among a small digital scale, antique Chinese teapots, and tall stack of guides to herbs and histories of tea in various languages.

  Kapur’s tastings are different from those in batches on an estate. As he samples at the same time teas from a handful of gardens, the differences from cup to cup are greater. The teas he selects and buys will end up not being sold under the garden name but his own label, San-cha Tea, India’s most selective, gourmet brand of tea. The best Darjeeling becomes Presidents Tea. Sipped by leaders that include Mikhail Gorbachev and Bill Clinton, this was India’s state gift at a G20 summit in 2010.

  Kapur did not come from a family with a background in tea. When he finished his master’s degree in management and marketing at the highly ranked Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies in Mumbai—set up in the 1960s in collaboration with Stanford’s Graduate School of Business—he went to Kolkata to work in the tea industry and never turned back. He experienced every aspect of the business, even working in Darjeeling, where he met and married the daughter of a tea planter. In 1981, Kapur moved to Delhi to open a dedicated tea boutique and the only one focusing on high-end teas. He not only selects, packages, and sells teas, but creates bespoke blends for clients ranging from hotels and restaurants to individuals around the globe.

  “You can learn the science,” he said after slurping tea spooned from another cup, “but the art must be cultivated.” The latter, developed slowly over many years and many thousands of teas, is an appreciation and sensitivity to the nuances of fine teas.

  Even then, tasting remains an exercise in articulating the intangible.

  During the first flush, Rajah Banerjee, who tastes in a particularly exuberant burst of energy, swiftly, and with such confidence in his perceptions that he finds no need to linger over the cup, said that trying to describe the smells and tastes of teas was “talking about the abstract in purity.”

  But was it good? Before or beyond anything else, it is about taste. As the Chinese poet and tea master Lu Yü put it more than a thousand years ago, “Its goodness is a decision for the mouth to make.”2

  CHAPTER 9

  Knocking Down

  India has two models for selling tea, and most Darjeeling estates use both. One is through private sales, where the garden sells directly to a client—be it wholesaler or retailer—or uses an export merchant. Less than half of Darjeeling tea trades this way.

  The remaining is sold at auction. A single brokerage firm—and a lone auctioneer—handles
95 percent of that. J. Thomas & Co. in Kolkata sells 55 to 60 percent of all Darjeeling tea, about 4.5 to 5 million kilograms a year.1 A weekly auction takes place every Tuesday.

  On a late-June day, just two weeks shy of the ten-year anniversary of Makaibari’s world record being set in the same room, J. Thomas held Sale No. 26, offering early second flush teas from the 2013 harvest. Buyers began arriving at eight thirty or so, darting into the building from the morning monsoon squall that was splattering fat, pregnant drops.

  The ten-story Nilhat House is a fine example of early–1960s functionalism, a niched and reticular brilliant white building, trimmed with bold, accentuated colorfulness in Himalayan sky blue. It sits a couple of blocks off the central square named BBD Bagh* along Mukherjee Road—originally Mission Row, purportedly the oldest street in the city—just a few buildings down from the Old Mission Church, a splendid 1770 building with a small, enclosed garden whose unharvested fruit trees conceal large, noisy birds.

  Mukherjee Road is narrow and tree-shaded, for much of the day its sidewalks crowded as a subway platform. Stretching along both sides of the street are hundreds of semipermanent food stalls that offer everything from scalding-hot chai in unfired-clay cups to fried aloo bonda (potato balls). As tea buyers made their way to the auction house that morning, stalls were already preparing for the lunch crowd by peeling potatoes, slicing eye-watering mounds of onions, and getting blackened kettles of stews and dals simmering. Across from Nilhat House, an elderly man squatted on the street and ground copious amounts of coriander seeds with a long, cylindrical pestle on a coarse slab of stone the shape of a tombstone. Another slapped chapatis between his palms. Wide, woven baskets displaying mangoes and nested clusters of still-green bananas sat between them.

  Shaking out their umbrellas, the buyers followed the wide, curving stairwell, lined with a wall of small tiles in vibrant shades of California blue, to the auction room on the second floor. With six gently tiered rows, each with a dozen or so seats and an aisle running up the middle, it has the feel of a college lecture hall. A square of wood attached to the armrest unfolds into a small table.

  Buyers greeted each other as the seats gradually filled. Some made last calls on their BlackBerrys or stepped outside into the foyer for a cigarette. They all carried the day’s auction catalog, some fifty or so pages thick. Its closely printed sheets showed the lot number, garden, grade, date packaged and dispatched, number of kilos and of packages in each lot, and the valuation of the tea up for auction. Each lot had been available to taste beforehand, and buyers had put tick marks beside the ones they hoped to get—teas that fit their own purchasing levels and desired flavor profiles. A handful of women stood out among the mostly male crowd.

  Just moments before nine a.m., three J. Thomas men entered the room. They shook a few hands as they came through the door and nodded to acquaintances, but didn’t dawdle on their way to the front, where a long desk sat on a dais. A gentleman in his sixties took a seat at one end, a man in his twenties sat at the other, and in the middle, a step higher and with a slightly raised lectern before him, was a man in age between the other two wearing a striped dress shirt, silk tie, and angular glasses that gave his face a somewhat severe look. This was the auctioneer, Anindyo Choudhury, the most influential man in Darjeeling tea.

  Going under his hammer that day were 794 lots from fifty-some gardens, a mix of low-, medium-, and high-end—or priced—teas. They had largely been produced a month or so beforehand as the harvest moved from the shoulder banji period into prime second flush.

  Choudhury’s copy of the catalog sat open before him. His right hand held a pencil to jot the final sales amount and his left a wooden gavel. No microphone, no laptop. At the back of the room, above the heads of the buyers, is a clock—the same plain, efficient digital type that hangs in schoolrooms, cinema lobbies, and rental-car agencies—which Choudhury watched closely. When the red numbers flashed 9:00, he began.

  He gave the lot number, name of the garden, grade of tea, and a line about quality if superior. For most lots, he moved up in Rs 5 or 10 increments, but on some of the higher-fetching teas that fall for thousands, he would skip 100 at a time. For tea that had been valued in the catalog at Rs 1,000, say, he opened at Rs 700 to 750.

  “Tata five hundred,” he called out during the bidding on an early lot, acknowledging the Tata Global buyer’s nod. Rs 505 got a nod from another buyer, and Tata agreed to 510. “Five-ten Tata,” Choudhury said. “Five-fifteen? Any takers at five-fifteen? Any takers at five-fifteen?” He paused only a beat and then said, “Knocking to Tata at five-ten,” smacking down the gavel. The two men flanking him both noted the buyer and agreed price. (A young woman from J. Thomas sitting among the buyers did likewise.) Choudhury penciled a quick note in his catalog and within a breath moved on to the next lot.

  And on down the list, page after page, in a clipped, slightly impatient pace. Far from the chanting singsong of a southern-American auctioneer filling a room with a steady river of musical phrasing, or offering praise or eulogies to the tea on offer, his style is professional, perfunctory, even a bit dry. He only pauses to sharpen his pencil.

  J. Thomas & Co. is the oldest and largest existing tea auctioneer and broker in the world. (The London tea auction ceased in 1998, after more than three hundred years.) The first public sale of tea in India took place in their Calcutta office on December 27, 1861, a consignment of 250 chests from the East Indian Tea Company and another hundred from the Bengal Tea Company. Originally named Thomas Marten & Company, the company began not as brokers of tea but of shellac, jute, and, foremost, indigo. “The color seeped from the packed chests [of indigo] and stained the length of Mission Row a deep abiding blue,” wrote a historian of the company.2 The current building’s name—from nil (indigo) and hat (market)—reflects its legacy in dye, as does its colorful trim. For a century the company was controlled by the British. The first Indian chairman was appointed in 1962; the last member of the Thomas family, the fifth generation, left a year later; the company’s final Brit departed in 1972.3

  Today, J. Thomas handles about one-third of all tea auctioned in India—almost 500 million pounds (200 million kilograms) a year. It conducts auctions not just at its main Kolkata center but also in other tea producing areas: Guwahati (Assam), Siliguri (the Dooars and Terai), Cochin (Kerala), Coonoor (in the Nilgiris of Tamil Nadu), and Coimbatore (a couple hours farther south in the same state). They also keep correspondents at the other main tea auction houses in Asia and Africa—Colombo (for Sri Lanka teas), Chittagong (for Bangladesh), Jakarta (for Indonesia), Mombasa (for Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Malawi, and others), and Limbe (for Central Africa).

  Over the last few years, tea auctions in India have become computerized, with buyers sitting silently in a room in front of identical laptops clicking their mouse to make bids or done anonymously online, where buyers do not even know who they are bidding against. That is, all except for the Darjeeling tea auction at J. Thomas’s Kolkata branch. The tradition simply remains too entrenched to halt. Anindyo Choudhury is the only tea auctioneer left using the open outcry system.

  Choudhury came to tea, like many in the industry, randomly, almost on a whim. “It was an unknown field, mostly word of mouth, family connections,” he explained in his office. “When I finished university”—the University of Delhi, one of India’s highest-ranked institutions—“someone said, ‘You want to try tea?’” Choudhury smiled at the thought, at the simple suggestion that led to his life’s work.

  He spent a year with Tata Tea and then joined J. Thomas. After working in their Siliguri office, he moved to the headquarters in Kolkata. For the last few years, he has been in charge of Darjeeling tea for the company.

  As auctioneer, though, he does more than simply call out lots and take bids. Choudhury spends just one day a week in the auction room. He passes more time in the tasting room, where he personally tastes each lot going up for sale and sets its value. That means that he tastes around 60 percen
t of all tea produced in the district. Every week, in a day and a half, he tastes a thousand different Darjeeling teas. The renowned wine critic Robert M. Parker tastes ten thousand bottles a year.4 Choudhury does that many second flush teas alone.

  Located on the fifth floor of Nilhat House, the long, narrow tasting room is at least twenty-five generous paces in length, with windows running along one wall and four parallel and unbroken rows of tasting benches cleaving it into strips. Choudhury pulls on a snug blue apron fronted with a deep V-neck that shows off tie and collar and works quickly down the long rows of tasting pots, cups, and teas. An assistant pushing a wheeled podium and a massive ledger follows behind, jotting down his remarks and initial values. Choudhury tastes not only each of those coming up for sale, but also retastes certain ones from the previous auction to see why they sold higher, or lower, than his valuation.

  “I am tasting with the manufacturing process in mind. What was right about the tea, what was not,” he said. J. Thomas furnishes gardens with reports on what they send to auction, and Choudhury travels frequently to Darjeeling to taste at the gardens themselves. He wants each tea estate to produce the best-quality tea it can, but also to help the gardens “get in line with the market.” No one is more intimately attuned to what Darjeeling’s gardens are producing and what buyers are demanding. He sits in a prime position to gauge the desires, changes, trends, and needs of the market and translate those to the planters.

  Assessing Darjeeling tea is the most “intricate,” according to Choudhury. The vast differences in quality from garden to garden, and even from week to week at the same garden, creates huge discrepancies in prices. “This makes it trickier,” he said, than other styles of Indian teas that lack such a flavor and price spread.