India – Page 11 – Discovering Tea

An assessment of the 2015 first-flush Darjeelings

24 April 2015

When you harvest the terminal bud of the tea plant several times, the stem becomes stressed and stops producing a new bud. This phenomenon of dormancy, known as “banjhi” in Darjeeling, marks the end of the spring harvest (first flush).

If I had to give my assessment of this season in Darjeeling, I’d say we received batches of very varying quality, and few of exceptional quality. But I’ll conclude on a good note, with the choice of a Puttabong Clonal Queen DJ48 and a Margaret’s Hope Tippy Clonal DJ30. The first represents what Puttabong does best; the second is quite simply breathtaking.

Tea is also about people and feelings

17 April 2015

Behind each “grand cru”, each tea, there is work, there are people. My work, as I see it, is not limited to tracking down the best teas in the world, it also involves getting to know the people who produce it. Drinking tea with them. Listening to them talk about their product. So when I’m in a Palais des Thés store and I look at that impressive wall of canisters, it’s not the names of the teas on the labels I see, but faces, like that of Vikas Gajmer, manager of Castleton (Darjeeling).

Darjeeling spring harvests

10 April 2015

It’s not only the tea plantations that are busy at the moment. Yesterday I received no less than 120 different tea samples to taste. As ever, you need to be quick. If I want to make an offer on one of these batches I must have tasted them all in one or two days at the most. After that, it will be too late.

Of course, I don’t drink all the teas, I spit them out after turning the liquor around in my mouth while I analyse it.

Infusion time for first-flush Darjeelings

27 March 2015

First-flush Darjeelings should be infused for between 3:30 and 4 minutes. The easiest way is to set your timer for 3:45. You have to be accurate when preparing this type of tea. If you want to retain a good balance between the aromatic bouquet, texture and flavour, you must stop the infusion in time. What you need is to give the aromas time to develop, while keeping the astringency and bitterness at a delicate level so they prolong the perception of aromas without overpowering them.

les prolongent la perception des parfums, sans leur faire ombrage.

News of the first-flush Darjeelings

27 February 2015

The weather can change very quickly in the Himalayan region. The sun might be shining, then in the blink of an eye you could be completely shrouded in a damp mist. This instability, which is very pronounced in Darjeeling, explains why the first teas of the year are sometimes harvested at the end of February, and sometimes in the middle of March.

I’ve just started tasting the first small batches from the new harvest, and for now they are nothing special. The earliest batches are rarely the best; they come from low-altitude plots.

School teaches us about freedom

9 January 2015

School is a place of learning: learning about knowledge, about language, but that’s not all. Learning about living life together, too. At school, we meet other children who might be different from ourselves, they might be stronger, weaker, richer, poorer, they might have a disability, they might have different opinions. They might come from a variety of backgrounds, they might have a different skin colour, a different religion. School is a place where we learn to live together. Language, tolerance and laughter helps form us as men and women.

The Margaret’s Hope garden celebrates its 150th anniversary

28 November 2014

This week, the Margaret’s Hope garden celebrates its 150th anniversary, and I am invited to the event. It’s an opportunity for me to remind you that tea was only introduced to India very late, in the mid-19th century. It was the British who set up the tea plantations in the country, after stealing the seeds of tea plants from China.

Margaret’s Hope makes teas that are sometimes exceptional, such as Margaret’s Hope DJ40 Moonlight, and Margaret’s Hope DJ219 Pure Av2. They are two fine teas from 2014 that I hope will be back next year.

The tea plant that didn’t stop growing

15 July 2014

Due to the harvesting of its leaves, a tea plant does not get bigger; instead its trunk thickens. So a tea field looks more like a bonsai forest. But left unchecked, Camellia Sinensis and Camellia Assamica can grow to a height of several metres. Here is Rudra Sharma, the planter at Poobong in India, in front of one of his wild tea plants.

Turning our backs on danger

4 July 2014

On a visit to a Buddhist monastery, I came across this monk sipping a fizzy drink, his back turned on a store of gas bottles. It made me think of the state of the world. We live as if there is no danger, as if it is possible to draw infinitely on the resources of our planet; we let water flow away, we pollute shamelessly, we don’t care about the rubbish contaminating our oceans… We are leaving future generations to deal with the consequences of our actions without considering the risk that one day, our poor, overpopulated, dried out, lifeless planet will explode in our faces.

The Darjeeling Toy Train knows how to take its time

27 June 2014

I have written before about the Darjeeling Toy Train, and this is its home. Its adventures continue as I write my blog. Sometimes it crosses my path, at other times it runs alongside me. It moves in its own way and at its own pace. It knows how to take its time. It covers the 80 km that separate Jalpaiguri from Darjeeling in eight hours, at an average speed of 10 km per hour – perfect for those who appreciate life in the slow lane.