Darjeeling (30 page)

This has given an opening for individual estates to penetrate the Indian market. Darjeeling’s gardens don’t have money to individually promote their brand abroad because their production and resources are too small, and they generally need to rely on importers for that—namely
the German importers, who many fear will lose interest in the teas once the PGI kicks into force.

But with the country’s quickly expanding middle class and a larger product awareness among local consumers, Rishi Saria sees the Indian market as the place to focus his efforts. To spread the Gopaldhara brand and get closer to local clients, his family’s company has begun selling tea online direct and opening up a handful of small retail outlets. Other individual gardens have been making similar small moves toward accessibility to directly target Indian customers.

Another significant change in the Indian market has been the recent craze for Darjeeling’s
green
teas.

“We used to sell one kind of green tea,” said Girish Sarda at Nathmulls in Darjeeling. “We couldn’t get a whole invoice [about 150 kilograms] so we used to beg for one case [about 25 kilograms] and then take all year to sell it. Now we are selling ten to fifteen types. And buying complete invoices.” Most of their walk-in customers come in looking for green tea, Sarda said. “They might buy black tea, but first they ask for green.”

Numerous green-and-yellow billboard ads appear along Hill Cart Road promoting Nathmulls’ “heritage shop,” which Nathmull Sarda opened in 1931. It remains the most distinguished tea retailer in the city. Girish is the fourth generation of Sardas to run it. “It’s in the blood,” he said. He stood behind the counter, arms slightly spread and palms on the glass case. A trio of young men in jeans patiently measured out tea into small gold-foil packets, tied them in a cross of white string, and packed them snugly into boxes to airfreight out to online customers. Honking cars passed along the steep Laden-la Road just a foot or so from Nathmulls’ always-open door.

“Health,” said Sarda. “That’s what green teas are all about.” Drinking tea for medicinal benefits goes back to its earliest days in ancient China and Japan, and even in Europe. While an ever-increasing number of scientific studies are proving the health benefits of tea, some of the claims being put forward today in India sound almost as miraculous as Thomas Garway’s seventeenth-century promises.

Nathmulls has printed a small brochure entitled “Green Tea: Your Prescription to Good Health,” which gets included with each package and offered on the counter in the shop. Folded in half and smaller than the palm of a hand, it has the Darjeeling logo at the top, a two-leaves-
and-a-bud pluck at the bottom, and a pair of red crosses bookending “Good Health” in the title. It includes a short legend of the tea’s healthy properties and also directions for preparation, but the bulk consists of eleven block paragraphs, a lengthy sentence or two each, on health:

GREEN TEA, being un-fermented, is a very rich source of ANTI-OXIDANTS.

TANINS (Polyphenols) namely EPICATECHINS and EPI GALLO CATECHIN GALLATE (EGCG) are among the strongest ANTI-OXIDANTS, active against many forms of Cancer and they also block the spread of the HIV Virus that causes AIDS.

When applied to the skin, they offer protection from free radicals present in sunlight and ultra-violet radiation, that damages the DNA cells, causing Cancer. These TANINS reverse pre-cancerous skin changes. QUERCETIN, another chemical found in tea, particularly inhibits the grown of Leukemia cells, thus preventing Blood Cancer.

It continues with terms in capital letters that the buying public may not know but sound sufficiently medically important.

Drinking tea can help control the Influenza Virus, restrain the growth of the Herpes Simplex Virus and can be helpful in checking Chronic Viral Hepatitis. The FLAVONOIDS also help relieve the oxidative stress to the eye lens, thereby lowering the risk of contracting Cataract.

And on, through a litany of diseases, with the promise of lowering the risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s to controlling tooth decay and “slowing the onset of Atherosclerosis and Heart Disease.”

As green tea’s popularity has come full circle regarding the public’s perception of its health properties, so have these selling points returned to the domain of local marketers, in their pamphlets and promises of cure-alls.

This surge in popularity has shifted the types of teas many estates produce. Green teas fit neatly into Darjeeling’s harvesting cycle. During the monsoon, the leaves are at their largest and least flavorful of the year;
withering in the humidity is extremely difficult, and fermentation is tricky. Many monsoon teas sell below production cost because of the lack of interest from big-spending buyers. They fetch between a quarter and one half of the price of tea from the first two flushes and are used almost exclusively in blends.

Green teas offer an ideal option for Darjeeling gardens that sell their monsoon-flush black teas so cheaply. Being neither withered nor fermented, green teas are easier to make during the rainy season. The leaves are simply steamed to arrest any fermentation, rolled, and then fired.

Some tea experts, though, consider them simply monsoon filler and are far from enamored with the outcome. “You can’t control quality during the monsoon,” said Girish Sarda. As with Darjeeling’s black teas, the best greens, he insisted, are from the other flushes. Indeed, demand has been strong enough for a couple of Darjeeling’s top estates to begin producing limited amounts of green teas during their premium first two flushes—and getting premium prices for them.

Sitting along the glass counter at Nathmulls are ten jars of selected green teas, with a handful of others on a shelf behind. One contains Rohini’s delightful first flush Green Enigma (Rs 5,800 or $105, a kilo), a leggy, large-leaf tea. Another holds second flush Emerald Green from Arya (Rs 6,400 or $115), which gives a light-colored liquor, mellow and aromatic, with traces of grasses and fruits.

For Sarda, Rohini’s hand-rolled first flush Green Pearls was 2013’s finest. “It’s the smoothest green tea, very light and stylishly done.” He smiled and plucked a couple of rolled pearls the size of earrings from a jar. Once steeped, the liquor shines a pale gold, a shade closer to champagne than hay. In the mouth, it’s plummy in a fulsome and rounded way, with hints of vegetables and greens but no suggestion of bitterness or even the pungent notes so prevalent in other green teas.

Nathmulls sells it for Rs 8,000 ($145) per kilo. That makes it more expensive than all but a half dozen of Nathmulls’ most exclusive and celebrated black teas. Such excellence comes at a price, even so close to its source.

The Rohini Tea Estate is one of the first gardens passed on the Rohini Road heading from Siliguri into the hills. Once it was the largest estate in Darjeeling. With the lowest section just above Siliguri, at the narrow, strategic neck of land that connects Assam and the northeast states with the rest of India, it has a quartet of borders within a brief bird’s (or aircraft’s)
flight—Bangladesh (roughly three miles), Nepal (thirteen miles), Bhutan (thirty-four miles), and China (fifty miles). In 1962, the year of the Sino-India conflict when China abruptly launched a two-pronged attack along the high Himalayan border it shares with India and occupied part of Assam for a month, India’s military took over Rohini’s land, closed the garden, and converted it into an army base. Nearly 80 percent of the tea bushes were torn out. According to Rishi Saria, whose family now owns Rohini, the owner fought the central government for years to get it back. Finally, in 1995, 400 hectares (1,000 acres) of it were returned, although just 33 hectares (81 acres) were still under tea. By then, the owner, Saria explained, had exhausted his resources in the fight and sold it off. Part of the estate was reopened with some new plantings. In 2000, Rohini changed hands again, with the Saria family purchasing the garden. Replanting continued. Today 145 hectares (360 acres) of tea bushes are planted on the estate, which now measures 320 hectares (790 acres).

The lower reaches of the garden, through which a herd of elephants from the nearby forest reserve frequently pass (and, once, knocked down a wall of the factory), begin just before the foothills abruptly jut upward. From here, tea bushes sweep right up the slopes to the ridgeline below Kurseong, where it borders a handful of illustrious properties including Makaibari and Castleton.

One hot and hazy Sunday July morning, at the end of the long driveway to the manager’s bungalow set among banana trees and lavishly flowering plants, B. B. Singh emerged from the private temple built behind the century-old planter’s bungalow. The Lucknow-born Singh has worked forty-two years in tea. Patient as a kind uncle, and generous, he began at Rohini when it reopened two decades ago and has overseen the replanting of the fields and restarting of the factory. “From zero to one lakh [100,000] kgs,” he said proudly, pronouncing it
kay-gees
.

A few miles down the Rohini Road at the factory, an ugly if spacious building built in the 1940s when Rohini was significantly larger and producing many times the amount of tea it does today, Singh sent for someone to give a demonstration in how to roll the green tea pearls that Girish Sarda favors.

Production of these is limited—just 50 kilograms, or 110 pounds, in 2013. As the leaf is too small and delicate for adult fingers to properly handle, early in the morning before going to school, a dozen or so girls about twelve or thirteen years old from the estate come to the factory and roll pearls for an hour or two with their softer, smaller, and more pliant fingers.

Some minutes later, a girl with a moon-shaped face, large, dark eyes, and white scarf looped loosely around her neck slipped quietly into the tasting room. Her dress was sunflower yellow and flourished in white swirls, snug on her upper arms and frilled along the bottom hem. A delicate silver ring adorned the middle finger on one hand, and a pink, beaded bracelet encircled a wrist. She set down on the counter a handful of just-plucked leaves as tender as baby spinach. Two pink flower clips held her shoulder-length bob away from her face as she bent over slightly to roll the leaves between a thumb and forefinger and middle finger. When a leaf didn’t immediately twist, she placed it in the palm of her left hand and spun the fingers of her right hand in a circular motion. The leaves are usually steamed first, and a half dozen get rolled into a single pearl, but the motion is similar.

The girl slipped out of the room as silently as she had come. A dozen small, leafy balls sat on the counter in a perfect row like an unstrung necklace.

Rohini is trying to do about 10 percent of its production as green teas. Some gardens are sticking to black—Marybong, for instance—but at least one of the Chamong group’s Darjeeling gardens has converted more than half its production toward green.

“We have the finest raw materials in the world,” said Sanjay Sharma of Glenburn, who questions whether green teas are the best use for Darjeeling’s premium leaves. Certainly, green teas have less flavor range. From Japan to China to India, they often contain similar characteristics. They are not nearly as complex or sophisticated as black tea and have fewer variants in aroma and liquor. “Black tea offers a lot more variety than green tea, which can be mundane,” Sanjay Kapur said.

The American tea maker Steven Smith noted that Darjeeling black teas offer a “sophisticated, flavorful cup” whose flavors have a broad and unparalleled spectrum from fruits, nuts, and florals to wines and muscatel. “But very, very few can pick out the unique qualities” of Darjeeling in its green teas. While Darjeeling’s black teas command the highest prices on the international market, their green teas do not. “You will not get top dollar for the best ones like a Chinese tea,” said Vikram Mittal in his New Delhi shop.

“The best black teas in the world are from Darjeeling. No one is near here,” Girish Sarda insisted. “But while there are top-drawer green teas in
Darjeeling, they can’t compete with the best Chinese greens.” In part, the tradition is not as deeply established, and gardens, simply, aren’t making that many green teas year after year. But they have nonetheless become an important part of the offerings alongside “specialty teas,” which include white teas, high-end green teas, and oolongs.

At Glenburn, Sharma expanded the garden’s portfolio. One of the most popular is the Autumn Oolong, a large-leafed traditional autumn tea with a twist. A tea maker, he explained, has to decide which characteristics to emphasize in the tea. “What we’re highlighting is only the aroma,” he said of the oolong. “Minus the body, minus anything else.” It gets a light wither and then a light roll. “We just gently bruise the leaves,” he joked. “We just massage them.” A fuller fermentation than most oolongs receive follows, and then a gap firing. The leaves are allowed to cool after a gentle first firing that doesn’t fully arrest the fermentation (the remainder of fermentation then proceeds slowly) before getting a hot and quick blast to finish it off. “It gives the tea a finesse, a delicate touch.”

Sanjay tried making this oolong with the leaves from the first two flushes, he explained in November as he began to tinker with the year’s new batch, “but only in autumn did I find those delicate floral notes with very mellow cups and basically fruity undertones—not like fresh fruit but moistened dried apricots, maybe raisins—and, in the dry leaf, hints of chocolate.”

But Glenburn has recently found their biggest critical international success in a specialty tea called Silver Needle (always singular; never
needles
), the finest and most delicate white tea, which is made solely with buds plucked when they are about to unfold. Silver Needle is a traditional but rare style from China’s Fujian province, where it is known as Bai Hao Yin Zhen. Its namesake color comes from the fine pubescence that coats the underside of each leaf bud. Once dried, the long, slender swordlike buds have a characteristic silvery hue. Made only in midsummer, and only from select fields planted out with cultivars that produce large, succulent buds, processing is delicate. Standing in the well-lit factory, Sharma held out a flexible, white tasting card with a handful of recently dried buds, an inch long and as erect as spikes. The plucked buds get a gentle wither, to reduce the moisture content gradually and avoid sudden shrinkage of the leaf cells, and then are dried. No rolling. No fermentation.