> High Tea, India Style
>
> http://travel.nytimes.com/2007/10/14/travel/14Tea.html
>
> THE Himalayas rose almost out of nowhere. One minute the Maruti Suzuki
> hatchback was cruising the humid plains of West Bengal, palm trees and
> clouds obscuring the hills to come; the next it was navigating a
> decrepit road that squiggled up through forests of cypress and bamboo.
> The taxi wheezed with the strain of the slopes, and the driver honked to
> alert unseen vehicles to our presence - one miscalculation, one near
> miss, could send the little car over the edge and down thousands of
> feet, returning us to the plains below in a matter of seconds.
>
> For an hour or more, as we climbed ever higher, all I saw was jungle -
> trees and creepers on either side of us, with hardly a village to break
> the anxious monotony. Finally, though, somewhere around 4,000 feet, the
> foliage opened just enough to allow a more expansive view. From the edge
> of the road, the hills flowed up and down and back up, covered with low,
> flat-topped bushes that looked like green scales on a sleeping dragon's
> flanks. Tiny dots marched among the bushes and along the beige dirt
> tracks that zigzagged up the hillsides - workers plucking leaves from
> Camellia sinensis, the tea bushes of Darjeeling.
>
> Flying to a remote corner of India and braving the long drive into the
> Himalayas may seem like an awful lot of effort for a good cup of tea,
> but Darjeeling tea isn't simply good. It's about the best in the world,
> fetching record prices at auctions in Calcutta and Shanghai, and
> kick-starting the salivary glands of tea lovers from London to Manhattan.
>
> In fact, Darjeeling is so synonymous with high-quality black tea that
> few non-connoisseurs realize it's not one beverage but many: 87 tea
> estates operate in the Darjeeling district, a region that sprawls across
> several towns (including its namesake) in a mountainous corner of India
> that sticks up between Nepal and Bhutan, with Tibet not far to the north.
>
> Each has its own approach to growing tea, and in a nod to increasingly
> savvy and adventurous consumers, a few have converted bungalows into
> tourist lodging, while others are accepting day visitors keen to learn
> the production process, compare styles and improve their palates - a
> teetotaler's version of a Napa Valley wine tour, but with no crowds.
>
> Still, such a trip requires a certain amount of fortitude, as I
> discovered when I set out to blaze a trail from estate to estate last
> March, during the "first flush" harvest, said to produce the most
> delicate, flavorful leaves. (The second flush, in May and June, is
> really just as good.) It wasn't just the roads - once marvels of
> engineering, now tracks of terror that produce daily news reports of
> fatal plunges - that made the journey a challenge. It was the egos.
>
> The men who run the estates are royalty - and they know it. When
> visiting their domains, you are at their disposal, not the other way
> around. At times, this can be frustrating; at others, delightfully
> frustrating.
>
> I HAD my first such encounter - the latter sort - at Makaibari, an
> estate just south of the town of Kurseong, around 4,500 feet above sea
> level. Founded by G. C. Banerjee in the 1840s, during the region's first
> great wave of tea cultivation, Makaibari remains a family operation, run
> by Banerjee's great-grandson Swaraj - better known as Rajah.
>
> Rajah is a Darjeeling legend: He's arguably done more for Darjeeling tea
> than anyone else in the district. Back in 1988, he took the estate
> organic; four years later, it was fully biodynamic, the first in the world.
>
> Today, it produces the most expensive brew in Darjeeling, a "muscatel"
> that sold for 50,000 rupees a kilogram (about $555 a pound, at recent
> exchange rates of around 41 rupees to the dollar) at auction in Beijing
> last year. You won't often spot his logo - a five-petaled flower that
> resembles the underside of a tea blossom - on grocery store shelves, but
> you'll find his leaves in boxes marked Tazo and Whole Foods.
>
> ........
>
> This is a long article. But a good read.