“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
CHAPTER 9
Knocking Down