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 thehighly 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
India has two models for selling tea, and most Darjeeling estates use both. One is through private sales, where the garden sells directly to a client—be it wholesaler or retailer—or uses an export merchant. Less than half of Darjeeling tea trades this way.
The remaining is sold at auction. A single brokerage firm—and a lone auctioneer—handles 95 percent of that. J. Thomas & Co. in Kolkata sells 55 to 60 percent of all Darjeeling tea, about 4.5 to 5 million kilograms a year. 1 A weekly auction takes place every Tuesday.
On a late-June day, just two weeks shy of the ten-year anniversary of Makaibari’s world record being set in the same room, J. Thomas held Sale No. 26, offering early second flush teas from the 2013 harvest. Buyers began arriving at eight thirty or so, darting into the building from the morning monsoon squall that was splattering fat, pregnant drops.
The ten-story Nilhat House is a fine example of early–1960s functionalism, a niched and reticular brilliant white building, trimmed with bold, accentuated colorfulness in Himalayan sky blue. It sits a couple of blocks off the central square named BBD Bagh * along Mukherjee Road—originally Mission Row, purportedly the oldest street in the city—just a few buildings down from the Old Mission Church, a splendid 1770 building with a small, enclosed garden whose unharvested fruit trees conceal large, noisy birds.
Mukherjee Road is narrow and tree-shaded, for much of the day its sidewalks crowded as a subway platform. Stretching along both sides of the street are hundreds of semipermanent food stalls that offer everything from scalding-hot chai in unfired-clay cups to fried aloo bonda (potato balls). As tea buyers made their way to the auction house that morning, stalls were already preparing for the lunch crowd by peeling potatoes, slicing eye-watering mounds of onions, and getting blackened kettles of stews and dals simmering. Across from Nilhat House, an elderly man squatted on the street and ground copious amounts of coriander seeds with a long, cylindrical pestle on a coarse slab of stone the shape of a tombstone. Another slapped chapatis between his palms. Wide, woven baskets displaying mangoes and nested clusters of still-green bananas
Kapur did not come from a family with a background in tea. When he finished his master’s degree in management and marketing at thehighly 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
India has two models for selling tea, and most Darjeeling estates use both. One is through private sales, where the garden sells directly to a client—be it wholesaler or retailer—or uses an export merchant. Less than half of Darjeeling tea trades this way.
The remaining is sold at auction. A single brokerage firm—and a lone auctioneer—handles 95 percent of that. J. Thomas & Co. in Kolkata sells 55 to 60 percent of all Darjeeling tea, about 4.5 to 5 million kilograms a year. 1 A weekly auction takes place every Tuesday.
On a late-June day, just two weeks shy of the ten-year anniversary of Makaibari’s world record being set in the same room, J. Thomas held Sale No. 26, offering early second flush teas from the 2013 harvest. Buyers began arriving at eight thirty or so, darting into the building from the morning monsoon squall that was splattering fat, pregnant drops.
The ten-story Nilhat House is a fine example of early–1960s functionalism, a niched and reticular brilliant white building, trimmed with bold, accentuated colorfulness in Himalayan sky blue. It sits a couple of blocks off the central square named BBD Bagh * along Mukherjee Road—originally Mission Row, purportedly the oldest street in the city—just a few buildings down from the Old Mission Church, a splendid 1770 building with a small, enclosed garden whose unharvested fruit trees conceal large, noisy birds.
Mukherjee Road is narrow and tree-shaded, for much of the day its sidewalks crowded as a subway platform. Stretching along both sides of the street are hundreds of semipermanent food stalls that offer everything from scalding-hot chai in unfired-clay cups to fried aloo bonda (potato balls). As tea buyers made their way to the auction house that morning, stalls were already preparing for the lunch crowd by peeling potatoes, slicing eye-watering mounds of onions, and getting blackened kettles of stews and dals simmering. Across from Nilhat House, an elderly man squatted on the street and ground copious amounts of coriander seeds with a long, cylindrical pestle on a coarse slab of stone the shape of a tombstone. Another slapped chapatis between his palms. Wide, woven baskets displaying mangoes and nested clusters of still-green bananas
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