Something’s Brewing
More
Indians are developing a taste for Chinese tea and good quality Indian
varieties. It’s time you put the kettle on too
I ONCE INTERVIEWED
Jean-Claude Ellena, the legendary French perfumer (First by Van Cleef &
Arpels, Declaration by Cartier, Terre d’Hermes, etc.) who created the first green
tea fragrance for Bulgari and started a fashion for tea aromas. I asked Ellena
what he liked about the smell of tea.
Actually, said
Jean-Claude, he wasn’t particularly fascinated by the smell of tea. He liked
the taste, of course, and so he bought teas from all over the world at Mariage
Freres, the Parisian tea-house (established 1854). He liked hanging around the
Mariage Freres tea room because he enjoyed the aromas associated with the
making of tea, the steam that arose from the pot, the smell that filled the
room etc much more than the actual fragrance of the tea.
Last month, I met Francis
Kurkdjian, one of the best perfumers of his generation (he is younger than
Ellena) who made his global reputation when he was only 26 by creating the
gloriously sexy Le Male for Jean Paul Gaultier. Francis is probably best known
in India for Green Tea, the fragrance he created for Elizabeth Arden, which,
perhaps because it was cheaper than the Bulgari scent that Ellena created, went
on to become a huge international success and spawned hundreds of imitators.
Francis didn’t like the
smell of green tea either. The point of his fragrance, he said, echoing Ellena,
was to evoke the idea of tea, of the mysteries and experiences associated with
it. (He is a tea lover though. We met at the Emperor’s Lounge at the Delhi Taj
and he drank cup after cup of tea!)
Later, I pondered the
irony. The two men who helped make green tea a basic fragrance material on par
with, say, jasmine or musk, didn’t actually like the smell. They liked the
taste but what they were capturing was the experience of making and drinking
tea.
Do Indians, as one of the
world’s great tea-producing nations, have any sense of how special that
experience is?
My sense is that we do,
at least at a subliminal level. If you ever pass a chai stall at a railway
station or a chai shop on the streets, you’ll get a strong whiff of cooked milk
and the sharp taste of strong black tea. For me, at least, that is one of the
key aromas of modern Indian life.
But what about green tea?
Do we even drink much of the stuff ? And what about the fragrance of high
quality Indian tea, which is as complex as the finest Burgundy? Do we ever
notice it? It is much, much better than the green tea aroma that the perfumers
were so disdainful of.
I asked Vikram Mittal
from whose shop in Delhi’s Lodhi Colony Market, I buy my tea. Did he feel that
Indians were taking the whole experience of tea more seriously?
Vikram’s family has been
selling tea for half a century now so he has some perspective on the market. In
his view, Indians are more into tea than ever before. Yes, he concedes, the
strong industrial CTC tea (about which I have complained many times in this
column), which we cook with milk and sugar may still overwhelmingly dominate
the mass market. But a growing number of Indians are beginning to ask for the
better stuff, not just orthodox teas from Darjeeling, but more unusual choices.
Take green teas for
example. For a long time, people only drank them at Chinese restaurants or if
they were on a health kick. But now, says Vikram, the demand is coming from an
unusual source.
Many Indian businessmen
(and their senior managers) visit China regularly for work. Many are there to
import Chinese products (furniture, consumer goods, machines, etc) and have to
spend around 20 days in China while the deal is concluded, the goods are
packed, etc. Says Vikram: “They are made to drink Chinese tea there because the
Chinese don’t make black tea with milk and sugar like we do. For the first
three or four days, this is torture for them. But by the end, they find they
actually like green tea. And when they come back to India, they start buying
green tea and drinking it at home.”
The real growth, though,
is in high-quality Indian black teas. In the old days, these teas were exported
because there was no market for them. But now, as more and more is being
written about tea, Indians are increasingly knowledgeable about the best Indian
teas. Consumers ask for Castleton, Lopchu and even Makaibari by name. This is a
new development. Some years ago when I included Makaibari in a TV film for TLC,
virtually nobody had heard of it; I guess TLC can take some of the credit.
The other change has been the growth of tea regions that
challenge Darjeeling’s position at the top. For years, Darjeeling was regarded
as fine tea, while Assam was regarded as strong, robust stuff without any great
delicacy.
This may have had
something to do with the origins of tea planting in India. As Rekha Sarin tells
us in her lavish
Chai, the Experience of
Indian Tea (which won the prestigious Gourmand Award), the British planted
Chinese tea varieties in Darjeeling to create an alternative to the Chinese
suppliers who dominated the global market. Till then tea was virtually unknown
in India.
Except for one place. The
Singpho and Khamti tribes, who lived in the jungles of Assam, drank what was
clearly tea, even if it was hard to recognise. Whereas the Chinese had little
bushes, the Assamese had large tea trees with big leaves. The tribals smoked
these leaves and then turned them into a drink . These tea leaves also turned
up in their cooking.
At first the British
rejected these leaves as being unsuitable for making what the world regarded as
tea. But eventually, work on creating hybrid bushes and clones (much of it done
at the Tocklai Experimental Station in Jorhat, which was set up in 1911) led to
the creation of an indigenous Assam variety that would yield a tea that could
be adapted for the Western style of tea drinking. But it remained much stronger
than the delicate, Chinese-origin tea of Darjeeling, so much of it went into
the mass market and into CTC industrial teas, leaving the top of the market to
Darjeeling.
But now, says Vikram,
Assam is striking back. Assam tea will always be different from Darjeeling
because it is a different variety and has a full-bodied malty taste, but some
of the best orthodox teas from top gardens can be excellent, and the demand for
them is growing.
Similarly, teas from
South India, which were once treated as mass-market, meant-for-CTC rubbish have
come of age. The best South Indian teas come not from Munnar or any of the
well-known tea towns but from less-known gardens in the Nilgiris near Ooty
where they have planted the Camellia sinensis bush (the Chinese origin variety
that grows in Darjeeling, the indigenous Assam tea is called Camellia assamica)
at high attitudes and created a tea that merits comparison with Darjeeling,
though, obviously, the
Plucked, Poured and
Preferred
The robust tea from Assam
(top left) actually has tribal roots; for many Westerners, the idea of tea is
more interesting than its taste (above) terroir gives it a character all of its
own.
So, lots is happening in
the tea world. And yet, it is not enough. As Rekha Sarin points out, though
India produces 1,111.76 million kilograms of tea, we drink only 80 per cent of
this. Around 20 per cent is exported. If every Indian had just one more cup of
tea a day, that would wipe out the amount we export. More gardens would be
planted to service the export market and more jobs would be created.
And it’s not difficult to
increase domestic consumption. Our per capita consumption is still lower than
say Ireland or the UK’s.
And at the upper end of
the tea market, the room to grow is enormous. At the moment, we are all going
crazy over coffee (as I wrote some weeks ago). But even if you take the
excessive prices charged for coffee by the likes of Starbucks out of the mix,
it still costs you around ` 25 a cup (minimum!) to drink a cup of good coffee
at home. (In fact, most machine capsules cost more) along with special
equipment (percolators, capsule-machines etc) to make decent coffee.
But the best teas in
India (and therefore, the world) will cost you around ` 15 a cup if you make
them at home. And no special equipment is required – just a cup and a kettle.
So, even at the top end, we miss out on one of the world’s great gourmet
bargains when we ignore tea.
And then, there is what
Ellena and Kurkdjian call the experience; the sound of the water boiling, of
the steam that emerges from the cup and more. And dark tea is even better for
this than green, because it has a more complex fragrance.
But why go that upmarket?
Find an Indian anywhere in the world and remind him of the rich, creamy aroma
of a dhaba chai, full of dark tea notes, milky fragrances and a whiff of sugar.
It is the smell of home;
the smell of India. The fragrance of chai.
-
·
Vir Sanghvi
·
HTBR27MAR16
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