He spent a year with Tata Tea and then joined J. Thomas. After working in their Siliguri office, he moved to the headquarters in Kolkata. For the last few years, he has been in charge of Darjeeling tea for the company.
As auctioneer, though, he does more than simply call out lots and take bids. Choudhury spends just one day a week in the auction room. He passes more time in the tasting room, where he personally tastes each lot going up for sale and sets its value. That means that he tastes around 60 percent of all tea produced in the district. Every week, in a day and a half, he tastes a thousand different Darjeeling teas. The renowned wine critic Robert M. Parker tastes ten thousand bottles a year.4 Choudhury does that many second flush teas alone.
Located on the fifth floor of Nilhat House, the long, narrow tasting room is at least twenty-five generous paces in length, with windows running along one wall and four parallel and unbroken rows of tasting benches cleaving it into strips. Choudhury pulls on a snug blue apron fronted with a deep V-neck that shows off tie and collar and works quickly down the long rows of tasting pots, cups, and teas. An assistant pushing a wheeled podium and a massive ledger follows behind, jotting down his remarks and initial values. Choudhury tastes not only each of those coming up for sale, but also retastes certain ones from the previous auction to see why they sold higher, or lower, than his valuation.
“I am tasting with the manufacturing process in mind. What was right about the tea, what was not,” he said. J. Thomas furnishes gardens with reports on what they send to auction, and Choudhury travels frequently to Darjeeling to taste at the gardens themselves. He wants each tea estate to produce the best-quality tea it can, but also to help the gardens “get in line with the market.” No one is more intimately attuned to what Darjeeling’s gardens are producing and what buyers are demanding. He sits in a prime position to gauge the desires, changes, trends, and needs of the market and translate those to the planters.
Assessing Darjeeling tea is the most “intricate,” according to Choudhury. The vast differences in quality from garden to garden, and even from week to week at the same garden, creates huge discrepancies in prices. “This makes it trickier,” he said, than other styles of Indian teas that lack such a flavor and price spread.
That June morning, one lot that had been dispatched on May 30 sold for Rs 545 while an identical grade and type from the same garden produced the following week, when better weather had kicked in and the season had moved more solidly into second flush, sold for Rs 1,050. “One week can make all the difference in Darjeeling,” the female J. Thomas assistant whispered after Choudhury slapped the gavel down on the sale.
Darjeeling tea is traded based on its quality rather than on a futures exchange like coffee, and on its daily—as opposed to seasonal or yearly—harvest. “It has a valuation structure based on quality,” said Steven Smith, the legendary American tea pioneer who founded (and sold) both Stash Tea and Tazo and now has his own high-end, eponymous brand of tea, in his office-cum-workshop in Portland, Oregon. It’s about the taste in the cup sampled from each invoice. Steven Smith Teamaker offers a small, well-curated selection of the world’s finest teas, and Smith samples around two hundred Darjeeling options a year—preselected by his associates in India from thousands of teas—in selecting tea to fill the roomy loose-leaf sachets of his boutique brand.
Choudhury gives each tea that sells in his auctions the price he thinks it is worth or that he wants to get for it. At the end, he is a salesman, Darjeeling’s biggest. He wants the prices to be high. To be sure, the company earns a percentage on each sale. (J. Thomas is “a feature in the formula,” he explained, “that the Tea Board of India is in charge of and negotiates.”) But as a champion of Darjeeling tea, he wants the market to accurately reflect Darjeeling tea’s value.
With unwavering punctuality, when the digital clock on the back wall reads one P.M., Choudhury breaks for lunch. Most of the buyers head down to the food stalls along Mukherjee Road and around the old law courts that offer everything from simple dosas (crispy filled South Indian savory crepes made from a fermented batter of rice flour and ground dal) to full thalis (a selection of small dishes with rice and bread and a dollop of pickle or chutney).
The J. Thomas staff, meanwhile, heads upstairs to the Tiffin Room. “Just like they used to,” said one junior member. And he meant it. The lunch menu remains mostly English, with chicken cutlets, beefsteaks, and, that June day, shepherd’s pie. Friday is Indian food. One of the two tables is for the dozen senior members, and the smaller one is for junior members. The room is not large and the staff must eat in turns. Stiffly poised black-and-white portraits of past J. Thomas leaders line the walls, confident men with tightly buttoned collars, narrow ties, and, on a few, regimental mustaches.
A seldom-used boardroom off the Tiffin Room guards another Raj-era tradition at J. Thomas. Into the shiny gloss of a Burmese teak dining table, each outgoing director since 1870 has carved his initials. Ashok Batra recently etched A.B. 1972–2013 cleanly into the polished wood with a penknife at the end of his four decades with the company. While his father retired as vice admiral of the Indian navy and his four uncles were also military men, Batra joined J. Thomas fresh out of college in Pune. “Tea is a gentleman’s industry and I learnt so much from it that I’ve no hesitation to say what I’m today is due to tea,” he said upon retirement in a newspaper interview.5
Hanging in these back rooms are a number of framed certificates commemorating records reached in its auction rooms. They illustrate the price difference between orthodox teas and CTC ones produced in the same area. One commemorates the Assam orthodox record being set at Rs 6,999 a kilo in August 2012 (then worth $127.25) by the Duflating Tea Estate. That same month, at the Halmari Tea Estate, the Assam CTC record was also reached: Rs 390 ($7.09), a paltry 5 percent of the orthodox tea’s amount. Halmari alone produces more than 2 million pounds, about 1 million kilograms, of tea annually, 95 percent of it CTC.
The money, as the junior J. Thomas member pointed out when looking over the certificates, is in volume.
At two P.M. Choudhury and his team are back in the auction hall trying to sell the remaining few hundred lots by three thirty or four p.m. Afternoons are more challenging; energy among the buyers can lag, and Choudhury presses hard to keep the auction moving at a steady pace.
“I want to keep buyers around at the end,” he said of his strategy in preparing the order of sales. It’s neither alphabetical nor organized by value. “I start with traditionally good producing gardens, spread out the quality in pockets, mix it up.” The key is the beginning, as the first five or so pages of the catalog—about a hundred or so lots—set the “market mood.” Choudhury wields complete power in the order, another element of his far-reaching influence.
While most gardens sell via private channels as well as at auction, some sell only through private means. These include those of the Ambootia group and the Chamong group, which counts Chamong, Marybong, Lingia, Tumsong, and Bannockburn in their Darjeeling fold of highly respected estates. According to Sujoy Sengupta, a marketing manager and key taster at the group, part of the issue for opting out of the auction was being “under the umbrella” of generalizations: good, medium, or bad. Chamong didn’t want their gardens to be characterized within these narrow categories. “Such simple terms don’t reflect our crop.”