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.”4 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.5 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.6 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.
“You can’t create a flavor,” said Sanjay Kapur of Darjeeling’s fine teas in his Aap Ki Pasand tea boutique, across town from Mittal Stores in Old Delhi. “It’s natural.”
Specifically, Darjeeling tea is orthodox black tea. The leaves are withered, rolled, fermented, and fired in the traditional method. Orthodox now implies premium teas that have been hand-plucked and hand-processed.
But more than 90 percent of the world’s (and the majority of India’s) black teas are produced by a method called CTC (cut, tear, curl). In the mid-twentieth century, with the growing popularity of tea bags, a new way to process leaves was developed that made it more convenient for filling the small sachets as well as brewing a quicker, stronger liquor—the name for the infused liquid. Instead of rolling and twisting the leaves, a machine chops and cuts them into small pieces with blades revolving at different speeds. The result is chocolate-brown granules of tea, even and pebbly rather than wiry and twisted like orthodox leaves. While CTC teas are easier and less expensive to produce, they don’t have a wide spectrum of flavors. Tasters look for color and strength, something known in the industry as “good liquoring.” The best way to assess is by adding a dash of milk to the cupped liquor. The drops disappear into the dark brew before blooming up and turning the tea a flat, slate brown.
“Darjeeling tea is a different ball game altogether,” said Kapur.
Darjeeling has poise rather than the bounce of other Indian black teas, patience over velocity, and, like the finest female vocalists, can carry body as well as subtlety and grace. Its quiet, unadulterated elegance lingers on the palate.