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.
“It’s a very delicate cup with a hint of astringency and mildly green and zesty,” he explained. The liquor is superlight, pale, almost silvery white in the cup, and carries subtle, clean flavors with a crisp, short finish and a touch of dryness. “If it’s oxidized, it’d go flat. Every cup needs a little astringency to stimulate the palate.”
His exceptional handicraft was awarded first place in the white-tea category at the 2013 North American Tea Championship in Las Vegas, a significant achievement from Darjeeling, which is very much a new kid on the white-tea arena. The 2013 harvest of Silver Needle was selling from Glenburn direct for $460—at the summer’s exchange rate, not far under Rs 30,000—per kilo.