Blog – Page 3 – Discovering Tea

Fingers of steel

6 March 2025

The appearance of the man in the pink hat is deceptive. Beneath his innocent-looking pastel camouflage are fearsome fingers of steel. With razor blades clipped to each forefinger, he moves swiftly between the rows of tea plants, plucking the bud and the next two leaves at lightning speed.

In over thirty years of travelling through tea producing countries, I’ve come across some amazing gadgets, but I’ve never seen digits extended by steel blades before. Tea is still harvested by hand in many countries around the world, which is a good thing. Some pickers are finding ingenious ways to speed up the process and reap the rewards.

A distinctive style

21 February 2025

In Taiwan, many tea pickers come from Vietnam. They have their own distinctive way of layering colourful clothing and sometimes combine this with bright protective covers on their fingertips to prevent their skin from turning black after a day of picking leaves.

Tea at the top

7 February 2025

From November to March, the days in the Himalayas are cool and the skies clear. This is when you can see the distant peaks glistening white beyond the tea bushes, like Kumbhakarna (7,710 metres), whose ghostly silhouette can be seen here. The best time to see them is at sunrise, before they disappear in the mist. The view is well worth the relative discomfort of the journey and the rudimentary morning wash with a bowl of cold water and a cloth, out in the open if you follow local custom.

Tea connects us

10 January 2025

This cup, shining in the morning light, is my way of wishing everyone a Happy New Year – a peaceful year in a troubled world. We all have different tastes; I wouldn’t have chosen this cup for myself. I thought it looked it a bit pretentious on its silver tray, sitting on a starched napkin. It’s not my usual taste. Then I put the tray on the bed, and the cup looked elegant and charming in the early morning sun. This was in Tbilisi, in a former printing house converted into a hotel. Each to their own cup, each to their own tea. Let’s hope there is always room for difference, for listening to others. Let’s hope we are driven more by the desire to understand than to judge. By the desire for peace. Tea connects us; tea calms us. Happy New Year 2025!

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.