Darjeeling (16 page)

The differences between the batches of tea during a single day are slight at best—but important. Weight, time, and amounts must be precise. Consistency is everything.

One by one, the liquors are poured out into the small, white tea bowls, the lid held tight with the fingers and the pot then propped horizontally into the bowl. The size is perfect: the infusion pot lies snugly in the bowl with the lid firmly pinched shut as it completely drains, with the trapped leaves acting as a natural strainer.

Going back to the beginning of the row, the assistant places the pots upright and checks the liquors in the bowls to see if any leaves have escaped. As these would continue to strengthen the brew, the liquor gets drained into a clean cup if needed. Each cup now holds tea quite similar in tone.

By the time the tea has been cupped, the manager and assistant manager, and perhaps the factory or production managers, have gathered in the room.

Like his colleagues on gardens across Darjeeling, Dhancholia works from left to right in deft and brusque movements. He vigorously shakes the last of the liquid from the pitcher, spraying the wooden floor (and his shoes) with fine droplets of tea, then turns over the lid, which holds the wet leaves in a neat mound: the infusion. He sticks his nose into the warm, limp leaves to take in the full range of aromas, from sweet and malty to fruity, lime blossom to tarry. In the infusion, he can gauge if the firing has been right. Acrid notes, burnt tones, and stewiness indicate that the firing has been too hot or too long, with too much moisture zapped from the overtoasted leaf. The reversed pot lid is set on top of the infuser pot, displaying the damp leaves.

The dry leaf is also examined for the color—shades of grays, greens, and browns—and size of the rolled leaf. “The appearance tells you whether you’ve withered it right. It’ll tell you if you’ve rolled right,” explained Sanjay Sharma at Glenburn during a warm but drizzly late-second flush tasting. “You want that twist and style.” He held a handful of dry leaf on a stiff sheet of white cardboard and sifted a pinch through his fingers. He snapped the cardboard taunt a couple of times, making the leaves dance while checking their sort. A loud, vintage air-raid siren sounded across the estate. The lunch break was over. A number of pluckers carrying faded umbrellas passed by the tasting-room window en route to a field just below the factory. “It will tell you if you sorted it right. Sorting is basically about size.” Part for quality and taste, part for aesthetics. “You don’t want your teas looking like long-grain basmati rice, you know,” he said with a smile. “That would be boring.”

It’s also important to check what H. R. Chaudhary at Namring calls “the cleanness of leaf,” checking for any stems or twigs, as well as the percentages of tips (buds), for fine-plucking.

Again starting with the teas on the left, Dhancholia moves to the liquor itself. He is looking at its color, briskness, quality, and strength. After noting the shiny clarity and depth of color in the liquor, he takes in the aroma. He leans in close, nearly doubling over his tall frame, with one arm held tightly behind his back in the position of a speed skater. In the other hand he holds a large spoon like a pencil and stirs and splashes the liquid to get the aromas flying around. His nose is visibly sniffing in the various scents among waves of tea spilling over the rim as he moves from cup to cup in rapid succession down the line. Nothing in his actions is delicate—or haphazard. It’s messy, and the Rajasthan-born Dhancholia wears an apron made of a tight blue-and-white-check material like that of
picnic tablecloths and a matching cap that comes down low on his forehead and sits like a moppy beret.

Finally, back at the first cup, he tastes the tea. He loudly slurps a generous mouthful of liquid off the spoon. Holding it for a moment, he takes two or three quick and sharp aerating sucks that flood the liquor around the palate and send it up into the olfactory organ in the nose in the manner of an animated wine taster. The tip of the tongue gauges sweetness and saltiness, the middle tartness, the back bitterness, and the back edges sourness. But he is also
feeling
the tea: the inside of the gums, cheeks, and the back of the tongue catch the astringency or pungency by sensation rather than taste. Tannins are responsible for the penny-brownish color of liquor and the astringency that gives tea its body and bite—its briskness. In a final exhale, Dhancholia spits out the mouthful of tea in a powerful stream into a tall, steel spittoon locally called a
gaboon
. He hesitates for a beat, gathering last impressions from the residual flavors on his palate, and then moves to the next. It’s all over in a few seconds. The mouth has registered the flavor, briskness (the opposite of flat or soft), pungency, and strength and caught any flaws.

And so on down the row of cups lined up along the counter, quickly, quietly, gruffly, keeping within the spell of the tasting in an almost hurried sense of trying to hold a complete set of impressions before any distraction can occur and break their imprint.

Outside the tasting room, Dhancholia is quiet and unassuming, soft-spoken. In a film, he might be cast as a provincial high school music teacher who coaxes greatness from his charges through subtlety, sensitivity, and talent. His physical, almost aggressive style of tasting seems at first out of character, until one understands that the seriousness he puts to the daily task drives him to literally jam his nose into warm leaves and splashing tea. Tasting demands complete focus. He calls the concentration required “a type of meditation.”

“You need a fresh mind—and a clean tongue,” said Girish Sarda at Nathmulls tea store in Darjeeling. Rajah Banerjee agrees. But you also must be highly practiced. Superior olfactory perception (and recognition) might be inherent in some, but it needs to be honed and cared for through years of repetition. “Because the tongue is a wonderfully sensitive bit of equipment that has many nerves that trigger in us a certain emotional message to the nerve center: sour, sweet, salty, sugary, bitter, whatever. It is a combination of all these sensations that one has,” Rajah said in a 2005 documentary about Makaibari. “So triggering of this abstract emotion
instantly needs the fusion of a fine tongue, a palate, a good nose, training for it, and of course the discipline of a good lifestyle.”
¹

In summertime he said, “It’s a natural talent that can’t be sullied.” By that he meant personal habits, much in the way an actor cares for the voice and an athlete the body. No chewing betel nut, no
gutka
(an addictive, powdery mix of tobacco, betel nut, and other flavorings sold in small, silver packets that litter the Darjeeling hills), nor even too much spicy food. Smokers, for Rajah, are hopeless tasters. “Mimics,” he said on a cold autumn evening, scoffing at the number of those who are professionally tasting teas yet carry on with such habits. “We’ve become an industry of mimics.”

“You can’t make it one hundred percent perfect,” Sanjoy Mukherjee, the production manager at Makaibari, explained during a first flush batch tasting. “But we can minimize the error percentage.” While he reckons that amount is just a single percent, good tasters—he ranks Rajah among the best—can pick out all the faults from rolling, withering, fermenting, and firing.

The teas aren’t tasted just a single time. It’s essential to sample them at varying temperatures as they cool. Certain tea aromas are volatile and dissipate—“high-strung” Sanjay Sharma calls them. Others hang around, a good sign. “The aroma should intensify as it cools,” Dhancholia said. “As it cools down, if you get the same flavor, then that is best.” In Delhi, Sanjay Kapur, India’s best-known taster and blender, also favors teas with “fixed flavors” that remain as the temperature decreases and the teas grow inward and intense. But his take is more practical, from a merchant’s perspective. These are more desirable because it is realistically how they are drunk, he explained. “Sipped, while talking. Enjoyed.”

Dhancholia keeps going back to certain cups in the tasting room, slurping and sniffing as he splashes the liquid with a spoon, occasionally curling a hand around the top of the cup so that nothing escapes as he leans down and draws in the aromas. He rechecks the dry leaves and the infusion of the teas he particularly likes—or dislikes. All the while, he is commenting on the teas and asking for certain details from the factory manager.

Banerjee offers his comments (or commands) in a high, weedy voice in a blend of Bengali and English as he goes back through the teas, slurping and sniffing. “Damn good! Damn good!” he repeatedly marveled about a handful of cups during a first flush tasting with sixteen batch samples lined up. When he considered one anything less, it was immediately obvious to
those in the room by his exaggerated grimaces and dramatic spitting of the tea into the
gaboon
followed by a calflike moan. While Dhancholia and Sanjay might be a touch less theatrical, they are just as demanding.

Most tasters note the better batches by moving the tasting bowl one position forward or backward like a chess pawn, or even above on the small tile ledge of the window, mixing up the once-orderly line and leaving the tiles wet with splashed tea and stray infused leaves.

While tasting has a routine and a ritual, it is not fully quantifiable nor scientific. “There is a science to it, yes, but also an art,” said Sanjay Kapur, a round soupspoon in hand. In his late fifties, Kapur is tall, refined, articulate, and well-read, with a penchant for tailored dress shirts and dapper boardroom blazers, and the patient way of listening of a diplomat. He also possesses one of the most discerning palates in the business.

Kapur gingerly picked up a cup and smelled the aroma before tasting a spoonful of it for the fourth or fifth time. Two wooden trays held porcelain tasting cups partially filled with first flush teas shining greenish gold. He had been tasting that morning, returning to the teas at leisure as they cooled.

His tea boutique, Aap Ki Pasand, and the offices behind (and above), edge a chaotic jumble of lanes in Old Delhi’s Daryaganj neighborhood not far from the majestic Mughal-era Jama Masjid and Red Fort. Outside, gusts of hot April winds, laden with dust picked up off the parched plains, gave the sky an insulating haze. But once inside, the heat and grit of the old city immediately receded. The quiet inner room—part laboratory, part atelier—acts as Kapur’s work space. Along a counter, old gadgets sit in mugs (magnifying glasses, various thermometers, a small barometer) among a small digital scale, antique Chinese teapots, and tall stack of guides to herbs and histories of tea in various languages.

Kapur’s tastings are different from those in batches on an estate. As he samples at the same time teas from a handful of gardens, the differences from cup to cup are greater. The teas he selects and buys will end up not being sold under the garden name but his own label, San-cha Tea, India’s most selective, gourmet brand of tea. The best Darjeeling becomes Presidents Tea. Sipped by leaders that include Mikhail Gorbachev and Bill Clinton, this was India’s state gift at a G20 summit in 2010.

Kapur did not come from a family with a background in tea. When he finished his master’s degree in management and marketing at the
highly ranked Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies in Mumbai—set up in the 1960s in collaboration with Stanford’s Graduate School of Business—he went to Kolkata to work in the tea industry and never turned back. He experienced every aspect of the business, even working in Darjeeling, where he met and married the daughter of a tea planter. In 1981, Kapur moved to Delhi to open a dedicated tea boutique and the only one focusing on high-end teas. He not only selects, packages, and sells teas, but creates bespoke blends for clients ranging from hotels and restaurants to individuals around the globe.

“You can learn the science,” he said after slurping tea spooned from another cup, “but the art must be cultivated.” The latter, developed slowly over many years and many thousands of teas, is an appreciation and sensitivity to the nuances of fine teas.

Even then, tasting remains an exercise in articulating the intangible.

During the first flush, Rajah Banerjee, who tastes in a particularly exuberant burst of energy, swiftly, and with such confidence in his perceptions that he finds no need to linger over the cup, said that trying to describe the smells and tastes of teas was “talking about the abstract in purity.”

But was it
good
? Before or beyond anything else, it is about taste. As the Chinese poet and tea master Lu Yü put it more than a thousand years ago, “Its goodness is a decision for the mouth to make.”
²

India has two models for selling tea, and most Darjeeling estates use both. One is through private sales, where the garden sells directly to a client—be it wholesaler or retailer—or uses an export merchant. Less than half of Darjeeling tea trades this way.

The remaining is sold at auction. A single brokerage firm—and a lone auctioneer—handles 95 percent of that. J. Thomas & Co. in Kolkata sells 55 to 60 percent of all Darjeeling tea, about 4.5 to 5 million kilograms a year.
¹
A weekly auction takes place every Tuesday.