When I visit a tea producer, I try to take a few samples for them to try. Most farmers don’t travel. They spend the whole year on their plantation and have very few opportunities to taste teas other than their own. I think it’s important to give them a chance to try other teas, not in order to imitate them, but to inspire them and connect them with other tea producers who are proud of what they make. These tea tastings, like here in Satemwa in South Africa, are very special to me.
Tea doesn’t harvest itself. It’s important to me to highlight the work of the people who pick the buds and the next two leaves from each shoot that make up a quality plucking. This delicate work, still done by hand in many countries, is particularly important because it is impossible to produce a good tea if the leaves are not picked carefully enough in the first place.
To make good tea, you need to know your tea bushes well. It’s a lot easier if you’ve tended them yourself from a young age. Many plantations – like this one in Satemwa, Malawi – take their own cuttings and then grow them in a nursery for eighteen months. Shaded to protect them from too much sun and too little humidity, the cuttings develop their root systems. Later, the young tea plants are planted out in the ground and begin their adult lives. Then it’s time to harvest the shoots, which are few and far between in the early seasons, but become more abundant as the bushes develop and branch out.
