Some who trade within the auction system quietly say that the gardens who only sell to private buyers don’t have confidence in their tea’s quality. Chamong, though, likely knew they could sell their product for higher prices outside the system. Especially when dealing with high-end retailers such as Harrods, Whittard of Chelsea, Twinings, and Fortnum & Mason, even Nathmulls in Darjeeling, direct deals can make a garden more money.
Tea merchant Vikram Mittal in New Delhi offered another reason for direct sales: Many private buyers simply don’t have access to the Kolkata auction system. He said, “They can pay a little bit more—and would rather get it directly from the garden.” The immediacy and intimacy is appealing. “At auction there is a wall between garden and buyer—the broker.”
Direct purchasing can also avoid one of the biggest disadvantages to the auction, the time lag, said Mittal, who buys using both methods. He puts that difference at about four weeks, the time it takes for samples to be drawn and sent to the broker, tasted, graded, valued, listed, shown, sampled, auctioned, and then dispatched to the buyer. (Choudhury estimates that about eight kilograms, or eighteen pounds, is lost in every lot from samples, a notable amount from the garden’s point of view.)
The urgency in getting first flush teas into shops means many gardens and buyers prefer the direct method for spring teas. “Buying time is short,” said Choudhury. “The crop is small. The season is short.” Yet, he added, “there is a huge buying requirement.” The excitement of its being the year’s first teas adds a touch of frenzy. The second flush is longer and larger and has a bigger showing in auction.
While Ambootia’s and Chamong’s estates might have opted out of the auction, the majority of Darjeeling’s gardens have not. Between 60 and 65 percent of them still send teas to J. Thomas, including top producers (and price getters) Jungpana, Castleton, and Thurbo.
The auction room has a frisson and buzz. It’s riskier, to be sure. After selecting tea to bid on from the catalog, a buyer might get it for less that hoped for, or more. Or, maybe not at all. Gamesmanship, strategy, and tradition are all on display.
On the afternoon following the auction, in his office at the end of a fourth-floor corridor, the Kolkata-born Choudhury was much more relaxed than he had been behind the dais with gavel in hand. Cordial and clubby in a congenial way, he has a willing laugh. He appears trim and erect in an athletic rather than military manner—the comparison is not arbitrary; he studied at an Army Public School in Delhi before going to university—like someone who plays squash (aggressively and against a younger colleague) a couple times a week.
He was reviewing the catalog from the previous day’s auction. Held together by a thin, brown thread, the stack of printed sheets was heavily marked up with pencil in a quick, loose hand. His office was sparsely decorated, the walls largely empty, as if he had initially hesitated on what to hang and then just got used to it. A window looks over the company parking lot. Leaves, blown down in a brief but fierce midday downpour, stuck to the roofs of cars like postage stamps.
Choudhury had already tasted the upcoming lots and given them provisional values. Now that he had the current pulse of the market, he could assign them their final numbers. Reporting on that just-completed sale, the Economic Times—India’s most widely read business newspaper (and the second most widely read one in the world after the Wall Street Journal)—noted that the market, which had been a touch subdued, had begun firming up. “Darjeeling teas showing an improvement in quality was readily absorbed.”6 The superior crop was coming in. The teas were increasing in depth and appeal.
The stern demeanor of Choudhury’s face had softened (in part from not wearing his glasses), and he seemed more patient than he had in the auction room. He needs to keep the buyers in order, he explained with a sly smile, smoothing down his black mustache. “If I lose concentration, I may knock something down early, so they try to distract me, say something, make jokes.”
His style for cupping the gavel is more practical than original. “If you hit it too hard, the damn head is liable to go flying off,” he said with a hearty laugh. Beside, cupping it also diffuses the noise, a not insignificant point when he bangs the gavel down more than seven hundred times on auction day.
Precisely at three thirty P.M.—punctuality clearly an inherent, or inherited, J. Thomas trait—an elderly bearer in a white cotton uniform glided along the corridor with a cart, serving tea to each office.
Darjeeling? “No,” Choudhury said with a sheepish smile. Most Indians, he explained, don’t like such light teas. “They want some body in their cup.” There was only Assam orthodox, brisk and bold, offered with milk and sugar.
A half dozen reddish biscuits sat on the cup’s saucer. Similar to Wheat Thins but flakier and saltier, they had a generous seasoning of masala spice. After dipping one in the tea and taking a bite, it was clear the office demanded some body in their snack, too.
With his power, exceptional palate, continual tasting, and acute sense of what the market is producing, it’s hard not to see Anindyo Choudhury as Darjeeling tea’s Robert Parker. “Tasting,” Choudhury said, “is like a skill, like having a memory on your tongue.” Parker clearly possesses the ability to not simply distinguish among the nuances of taste and aroma in wines, and express those traits in a graspable manner, but also recall them, with precision, later.
While Parker is a prominent global figure, outside the confined world of Indian tea in India, Choudhury is unknown. He has no newsletter or bestselling guides like Parker. Shop owners do not wait to see his valuations to buy or to set prices, nor has he changed, to any discernible degree, the style of teas being made in Darjeeling to fit his taste preferences.
But within the industry, Choudhury is a sought-after ally. “Everyone wants him on their team,” according to one prominent Indian tea merchant, who said Choudhury is the “most powerful” person in the business. His word alone can do wonders. “When he recommends a garden to a buyer …,” the merchant said, pausing, a little breathless at the thought. “How he can talk about a tea for five minutes—or nothing, or neglect you. By his auction ordering.”
As brokers rely on the trust of both producer and buyer, integrity is considered the guiding principle in hiring at J. Thomas, reported a piece in the Hindu a few years ago celebrating the 150th anniversary of the first public tea auction in India, and recruitment is “based on sound background, schooling and sportsman-like qualities.”7 Sports clearly remain important. Company profiles of J. Thomas’s current top management show men who play table tennis and badminton, cricket, and tennis, and Kavi Seth—the auctioneer of the Makaibari record and now one of its top directors—is a former number-one-ranked squash player in Bengal.8
But also integrity. In listening to dozens of people in the industry, Choudhury’s image seems unblemished, his reputation excellent, even if people don’t always agree with his pricing. That’s imperative. For the system to continue to function, buyers need to have confidence in his impartiality and judgment. He is more than just a middleman between garden and buyer.
While one day he will no doubt leave the auction room to a younger colleague and move from senior management to join Seth as one of the half dozen or so company directors, for the moment he remains the front man of Darjeeling’s industry, through whose fingers more than half its tea passes.
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