Darjeeling
Authors: Jeff Koehler
To Tod Nelson, for years of friendship and reading early drafts
8. A Decision for the Mouth to Make
10. The Raj in the Hills Above
Author’s Note and Acknowledgments
The rows of ceiling fans struggled to cool the raked Kolkata auction room. Their collective whir barely covered the cawing of large crows on the trees outside or the incessant honking horns from black-and-canary-yellow Ambassador taxis moving through the perpetually slow traffic. Nearly two inches of rain had fallen on Friday, and after a relatively dry weekend, drenching monsoon showers returned on Monday, July 14, 2003. It was approaching ninety degrees Fahrenheit, and the humidity stood at over 90 percent. Parts of the city remained submerged knee-deep in water. Dark, spongy clouds hung overhead. Only the lightest of breezes moved in the thick air.
Tea buyers, agents, exporters, blenders, and “packeteers” had gathered for Sale No. 28 of Darjeeling tea
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on the second floor of Nilhat House, a boxy and bright midcentury midrise shoehorned into the old city center. The building houses J. Thomas & Co., India’s oldest and largest firm of tea brokers and auctioneers.
Darjeeling is known for its single-estate teas, unblended and unflavored. With characteristic brightness frequently likened to newly minted coins, fragrant aromas, and sophisticated, complex flavors—delicate, even flowery (more stem than petal, as one expert blender put it), with hints of apricots and peaches, muscat grapes, and toasty nuts—it’s the world’s premium tea, the “champagne of tea.”
That day at the weekly event, the auctioneer Kavi Seth thought they might see unusually high prices with the exceptional quality of some of the tea on offer—specifically a lot from Makaibari, one of Darjeeling’s oldest gardens. Since the early 1980s, Makaibari had been under control of Rajah
Banerjee, the charismatic, fourth-generation owner, who converted it into an organic oasis with more than half the estate under deep forest cover. He sought exceptional leaf quality through healthy soil and viewed the farm as a complete, self-contained organism. Some buyers considered it to be the finest, purest Darjeeling tea available—with a cosmic edge. Banerjee farms observed wider lunar patterns and planetary rhythms, and the lot in question up for auction that day, christened Silver Tips Imperial, had been picked under a full moon. “If Darjeeling is the champagne of teas,”
Time
magazine proclaimed in 2008, “Makaibari is the Krug or Henri Giraud.”
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Seth started with J. Thomas in 1985, had been intimately involved with Darjeeling tea for a decade, and had been in charge of the catalog and auction of Darjeeling teas for the previous two years. While he had tasted tens of thousands of Darjeeling teas, Seth recognized something extraordinary in the Makaibari lot. A decade later he still vividly recalls its “special flavor and quality.” Seth did two things to build excitement. First, he spread the word among buyers. Second, quite extraordinarily, he listed it last in the catalog. Normally the standout teas are toward the beginning and then mixed around. But this would be the day’s final lot and force buyers to stick around until the very end.
In the crowded auction room, Seth worked through hundreds of lots of teas, coming, at last, in late afternoon, to the anticipated Makaibari offering.
That midsummer, Darjeeling tea was fetching on average 150.25 rupees per kilo, then worth about $3.25, at the weekly auction, with leaf grades—the highest level—averaging Rs 295.
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(By contrast, the year’s all-India average for 2003 was Rs 77.25.)
*
Yet Seth opened the bidding at Rs 3,000.
Buyers, perhaps drained from the anticipation and tension, the warm room, and humidity outside, and keenly aware of the significant amount of money they were committing to laying out, slowly countered one another with slightly higher offers under the auctioneer’s nudging.
Then a new buyer jumped into the bidding. Representing a European firm, he was keen to secure the lot of five small chests of tea. A current surged through the room, and bidding rallied.
Sitting at a dais in the front of the room, the auctioneer took offers and counteroffers as the amount spiraled aggressively upward by the hundreds of rupees, speeding past Rs 8,000, Rs 10,000, and Rs 12,000. Soon it
approached—and quickly shot by—the standing world record of Rs 13,001 for tea sold at wholesale auction that had been set in 1992 by a tea from another Darjeeling estate, Castleton, which abuts Makaibari. A murmur charged through the audience—and then a hush. Everyone was aware of being part of something special. Seth thought he would see a good price that afternoon for the lot, but he hadn’t imagined it would go this high.
Darjeeling tea is often sold not just by single estate like wines, but also by
flush
, or harvesting season, a term nearly exclusive to tea from the far northeast of India. The fresh shoots from each bush are picked—or, more properly,
plucked
—every week or so from mid-March to mid-November, as they gradually progress through a quartet of distinct seasons, beginning with first flush in spring and ending with autumn flush. While Darjeeling tea’s unique brightness and aromatic flavors set it apart from other similar types of tea, each of the four periods produces a tea with distinctive characteristics.
Makaibari’s stock selling that day had been picked during the prime early-summer second flush, when Darjeeling tea is at its most vibrant. Tea from this flush has a sublime body and pronounced muscatel tones, with a mellowed, intense fruitiness and bright coppery color. “At its best, Second Flush Darjeeling is unquestionably the most complex black tea the world produces,” wrote James Norwood Pratt, one of North America’s foremost tea authorities, “with an everlasting aftertaste it shares with no other.”
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Upward the price climbed, past Rs 14,000, Rs 15,000, and Rs 16,000, demolishing the auction world record. Past Rs 17,000.
An agent for Godfrey Phillips India, bidding on behalf of a couple of international clients, agreed to Rs 18,000 per kilo ($390.70). The amount was 120 times more than Darjeeling tea’s average and almost 250 times the country’s average for tea at auction. A million rupees—ten
lakhs
, as they say in India—for the small lot containing fifty-five kilograms (about 120 pounds) of tea. That’s the equivalent of two tea-stuffed suitcases going for more than $10,000 each wholesale.
The European representative desperately wanted the invoice but had reached his authorized limit. He frantically tried to call on his cell phone for the go-ahead to bid higher.
Seth asked for takers for a higher bid.
The European buyer couldn’t pick up a signal. No one else said a word. The crowded room smelled of sweat and tension and humidity. Fans whirled overhead.
Seth asked a last time.
In the silent room the agent struggled to get a signal and make his urgent call.
“Knocking to Godfrey Phillips at eighteen thousand,” Seth finally said, smacking the table with the side of the wooden head of his Raj-era gavel cupped flat in his palm.
Cheers erupted in the auction room and a ringing round of applause. Seth thanked the buyers and participants—and their appreciation of the tea’s quality. Two of the five chests were destined for Upton Tea Imports in Holliston, Massachusetts, one for Japan, and two to an associate of Makaibari’s.
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The garden had just set a new record for tea sold at wholesale auction.
“It was a landmark event,” Seth said by telephone from Kolkata. “The record still stands. We are unlikely to see it broken for many, many years.”
Today tea is grown in forty-five countries around the world and is the second most commonly drunk beverage after water. It’s a $90 billion global market.
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Until just a few years ago, India was the world’s largest producer of tea. Although overtaken by China, it still produces about a billion kilograms—more than two billion pounds—a year.
Tea can generally be classified in six distinct types: black, oolong, green, yellow, white, and pu-erh. All come from the same plant. The difference lies in processing. Nearly all of India’s is black tea, which means that the leaves have been withered and fermented and certain characteristic flavors allowed to develop. (Green tea is neither withered nor fermented, and oolong is only semifermented.) Yet the wide geographic and climatic range of India’s tea-growing areas, from lowland jungle to Himalayan foothills, means that it produces a variety of distinctive black teas.
A framed Tea Board of India map leans against the wall of Mittal Stores, a cramped, sixty-year-old tea shop in New Delhi’s quiet Sunder Nagar market. Bordered by a braid of blue tea buds and colored in the saturated gold and green tones of 1970s Kodachrome 64 slide film, on the map the country sits raised, like an old-fashioned wooden puzzle piece lifted from its base, in three-dimensional thickness but strangely flat. Green-shaded areas, those with tea estates, stretch across the northeast limb of the country, the spine of hills that rise up in the south, and a handful of other spots in the north. Each place gives a little different
character to the final cup, from the full-bodied teas of Assam to those from Nilgiri, which can be wonderfully brisk and aromatic yet carry a certain freshness.
Darjeeling has only eighty-seven tea estates. Together they have just 19,500 hectares (48,000 acres) under tea. That’s not much; Queen Elizabeth II’s Balmoral Estate measures the same amount. They produce only a fraction of the world’s tea, and less than a single percent of India’s total. Yet the tea from that limited crop is the indisputable jewel in India’s tea-producing crown, its most iconic brew, and the flag-bearer of Indian teas abroad. Here, ecology, history, tradition, culture, and terroir come together to create a sublime product with an unduplicable essence.
“It has complexity with a certain level of intensity,” noted Vikram Mittal on a recent autumn morning in his busy shop. He sipped a small cup of first flush Jungpana, an estate reached by hundreds of steps and considered by many in the industry to be currently producing the best tea in the district. “Complexity and flavor. An aftertaste that stays, that fills the mouth. A whole experience.” Mittal, in his early fifties, thin, with frameless glasses perched on his sharp nose and a graying mustache, retains the enthusiasm and sense of wonder of a young science teacher. “There is complexity with a certain level of intensity. There is that complex aftertaste, that feeling you get afterward,” he said in his quiet voice. “You can see it when you taste it with other teas. When you only drink Darjeeling, it seems nothing special. In the beginning I thought it was a bit of hype. But when I started tasting it with other teas …” He finished his cup of Jungpana and shook his head slightly, still amazed, after all these years, after thousands and thousands of teas, by the flavors that Darjeeling’s hills can produce.