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Champagne among teas

Tea-drinking nations are willing to pay any price of an exclusive chest as the delicate taste of Darjeeling tea is hard to duplicate, says Dhananjaya Bhat.

Like most regular and avid tea drinkers. I have always been puzzled by the high premium attributed to Darjeeling tea. Connoisseurs call it 'the Champagne of teas’. Some tea-drinking nations readily pay very high prices for an exclusive chest. Few years ago, a side of Casyleton's 'muscatel’ fetched a whopping Rs 13,001 for a kg at the Calcutta Tea Auction, bid by Norin Company of Japan.

With only 18 to 20 million kg produced annually to serve the entire global market, it is a rare opportunity to drink the ultimate in teas. The history of the Darjeeling tea is traced way back to 1853, when the British officers acquired the Darjeeling hills from the ruler of Sikkim to provide sanatorium to the heat-stricken officers of the Raj. The resplendent snowy peaks of Mt Kanchenjunga, the bracing climate and the verdant countryside soon endeared itself to the British and they immediately set about transforming it into a corner akin to 'good old England’. Around the same time, an entrepreneurial Englishman by name Dr Archibald procured some tea plants from China and began experimenting with the growing of tea. Although the cultivation of indigenous tea had already begun in Assam, it was soon discovered that the Darjeeling variety was an absolute winner - the delicate and subtle fragrance differentiating it from any other known variety. The high altitude, the crisp mountain air, the soil, the rainfall and the mist, all combined to give Darjeeling tea a flavour that can be neither matched nor duplicated. A Darjeeling tea planter states "the higher it is grown, the thinner a tea's body and the more concentrated its flavour as a rule. Yet altitude is only one factor determining the quality of Darjeeling. The intermittent cloud and sunshine playing over the slopes make their contribution, as do exposure, that is, the direction a slop faces, and a host of other variables, like the soil chemistry, temperature and rainfall unique to the area.”

Another and more surprising-factor affecting tea taste is the wind. An additional explanation for Darjeeling tea's uniqueness is the type of tea plants grown. Most are of the China or China-hybrid type, which are found almost nowhere outside China and Japan except in Darjeeling and the Caucasus. These plants are more resistant to cold than India's native tea bush, the Assam jat or type, but their yield is much lower and the leaf smaller. On China bush this small leathery leaf is a dark glossy green, often covered with silvery down.

Since the tender young shoots must be harvested as soon as they are ready, each bush on an estate must be hand-plucked every four to eight days throughout the growing season. A typical plant yields only about one hundred grams per year, that is, maybe four ounces, of Darjeeling tea. This is less than a third of the yield of Assam plants growing in the plains. Each kilogram of Darjeeling consists of over twenty thousand individual shoots; Such figures save to illustrate the extent of human effort that Darjeeling tea requires.

The finest Darjeeling tea is gleaned from young tender leaves depending on the seasonal variations. Unfortunately, unscrupulous merchants around the world are taking advantage of the loopholes in policing the marketing of Darjeeling tea. The fact that over 40 million kilograms of teas named as Darjeeling is sold in the various supermarkets of the world- double the production in Darjeeling, makes this palpably clear.

The main handicap is that very few of the famous tea plantations of Darjeeling are being re-planted. Of late, some of the tea companies have come forward to save the Darjeeling tea, and some are more determined than ever to bring back the flavour of Darjeeling teas into the fortunes of the Indian tea industry.