2024 – Discovering Tea

Our Italian friends

6 December 2024

Palais des Thés opened its first shop in the sixth arrondissement of Paris in March 1987 with the ambitious mission of introducing the French to tea. After 37 years of dedication and enthusiasm, thanks to its passionate team, its quality teas, close relationships with farmers and delicious house blends, Palais des Thés has won over many people to tea through a network of more than a hundred shops and prestigious partners.

In November 2024, Palais des Thés opened its first shop in Italy, in Padua. What a wonderful challenge to bring tea to the Italians! Our Tea Sommeliers and experts, led by the indefatigable Matteo, have embarked on this exciting venture to take tea into the homes and hearts of our European neighbours, the coffee experts.

The experience of plucking tea

29 November 2024

To understand tea and how it’s made, there’s nothing like experiencing it first hand, starting with plucking, when the young leaves are selected for processing. It’s only by doing it yourself that you can truly appreciate the precision, care and difficulty involved in every stage of making a tea, especially one of premium quality.
Here in Kalapani (Nepal), Céline, who manages the entire supply chain for Palais des Thés, is being shown how to pluck tea, and is concentrating on picking the bud and the top two leaves from each shoot that has reached the desired stage of growth.

Getting to know your teas

15 November 2024

You can tell a lot about a tea by looking at the dry leaves: its bud content, the size and colour of the leaves, the degree of oxidation. This is one of the main reasons for buying tea loose, to appreciate its quality. You don’t need to be an expert, but it’s good to be able to make informed choices about your tea, and the appearance of the leaf plays an important part in what you experience when you drink it.

There’s another reason to buy loose tea: the pleasure of tea doesn’t start with the first sip, it starts when you’re at home boiling the kettle and can’t decide which tea to brew. As the water heats up, you lift the lids off your caddies, jars or tins and recreate the experience of the tea shop: smelling the leaves, looking at them and choosing the tea that feels right for the moment. This process prepares us for the ritual of tasting.

Here, all you have to do is look at these beautiful leaves (the remarkable work of many small Nepalese growers deserves a mention) and you’ll want to get to know them better.

The joy of tea

18 October 2024

You can travel the world sourcing, tasting and analysing tea. But it’s not often you get to actually make it – to pick the leaves, roll them in your hands, spread them out to wither, and watch them oxidise until it’s time to dry them. It’s a rare opportunity for a tea connoisseur.

Here in Georgia, Nathalie, our Human Relations Manager, and Charlotte, who runs our Rue Raymond-Losserand store in Paris, are discovering the joys of making tea for themselves.

They tasted it the next day. When this photo was taken, they hadn’t yet realised quite how special the whole experience would be, how proud they would feel. It was the first time they had crafted their own tea. An unforgettable experience.

Thinking of our friends

4 October 2024

In Nepal, the torrential rains have caused significant damage. Our thoughts are with all those affected. It is often the poorest who lose the most.

Fortunately, our friends the tea farmers are rarely at risk from overflowing rivers. Tea grows on higher ground and does better on mountain slopes than down in the valleys where the soil is too wet for Camellia sinensis. But after a particularly heavy monsoon, landslides can sweep away roads, homes and lives. Entire mountainsides can collapse in a mudslide, causing many casualties.

Nepal is one of the poorest countries in the world. Not only is it subject to severe flooding, it also suffers some of the worst earthquakes. All the more reason to remember our friends in this ancient Himalayan kingdom, home to many remarkable small tea producers. They depend on us for their livelihood. So let’s brew a cup of one of their delicious teas and think of them, each in our own way.

Feeling grateful

12 July 2024

Being a Frenchman, I admit I probably complain more than I should. And yet, as someone who spends much of the year travelling around regions of the world as diverse as a Himalayan kingdom, the Andes and the Great Rift Valley, in countries that are much less fortunate in terms of standard of living, I am well aware that France is the stuff of dreams, a kind of paradise in the eyes of so many of the planet’s inhabitants. It’s true that it shouldn’t take much for France to become a paradise if we united and sought compromise instead of adding fuel to the fire, preferring to fight rather than agree, thinking that violence will solve every problem. Why are we still so comfortable protesting instead of trying to build bridges? It’s a mystery to me.

Tea has opened my mind to harmony, to finding the right balance, to paying attention to others. What if we looked at the world differently? Let’s have a cup of tea and look around us. As we sip the delicate nectar, we can contemplate this beauty and feel grateful.

Smoked tea

21 June 2024

Smoked tea aficionados – who have been known to panic when their supply runs out – know that nothing else can match the powerful aromas of this blend from China, even if the Chinese themselves wouldn’t dream of drinking it. When you smell it, you could swear you were in the fireplace itself, it’s so intense. The most famous of these smoked teas is Lapsang Souchong. For some obscure reason, a molecule called anthraquinone has got up the European Union’s nose. So, from time to time, we have to approach new producers from various countries to ask them to test smoking processes using different types of wood, in this case pine needles.

Soothing, just like tea!

7 June 2024

The purpose of this blog is to tell you all about Camellia sinensis, not about the monuments, however impressive, that a tea researcher might encounter on their travels. And yet, as I stood in front of the Golden Temple in Amritsar, in the silence and stillness, entranced by the lights, the gold and the shimmering evening light, I felt a deep sense of fulfillment. I was completely at peace, despite the crowds. Serenity. Time stood still. I felt transported. Opportunity, happiness – a gift. These were my thoughts as I felt compelled to stop and take in my surroundings. I sat down and contemplated the reflections on the water. It seemed to me that this liquid element, this precious material, this gold, corresponded to what I feel when I drink a cup of tea. Something rare, unique and delicate. A call to peace, tranquility and harmony. When I drink tea, I close my eyes, and what I see is beautiful, radiant and soothing, just like the Golden Temple.

A special moment

24 May 2024

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.

A quality harvest

10 May 2024

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.