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A TRAVELOGUE: DARJEELING, LAND OF THUNDER

TEA CRAFT & ORIGIN

"Every year, I embark on an annual pilgrimage to key plantations around the world, where I sample the harvests I may include in our tea list. I believe it’s important to taste and select every tea personally."

By Taha Bouqdib,
Co-Founder of TWG Tea

There is no place I would rather be. Bumpy trips that start out speeding along dusty highways that soon turn into winding roads, then dirt tracks that funnel deep into mountains, leading higher into the mist, clouds and biting cold. Villages clinging at impossible angles to cliff-sides, dense jungles, gangs of monkeys, broken down trucks struggling to make it up steep roads. Each mile reveals more majestic views down into lush valleys. Such trips feel like some fictional voyage out of a storybook. Every trip to a tea plantation is as thrilling as the last.

My obsession with tea has brought me to plantations around the world, known for their tea-making prowess with regards to flavour, craftsmanship and their organic philosophical approach. My work with such plantations to encourage sustainable practices has transformed the tea industry, making us a global leader.

The origin of each tea from our collection begins with a voyage. Every year, I embark on an annual pilgrimage to key plantations around the world, where I sample the harvests I may include in our tea list. I believe it’s important to taste and select every tea personally, since our customers will inevitably notice the difference when they infuse their own cup of tea at home. The dedication it takes to create our beautiful teas and the sustainable methods used to create them come through immediately on your palate.

I also visit our own gardens which we have set up in certain exceptional plantations, where harvests are reserved exclusively for us. These gardens were created after years of collaboration with dedicated planters in specific regions, in order to create another level of taste experience. The tea we produce in these gardens is the result of years of heritage and partnership.

Tea was and always will be
my preferred mode of transport.

I experience a destination through its tea. Tea in Darjeeling, for example, segues naturally to the history of India, its geography, its organoleptic properties. Discussing and sharing about Darjeeling is like opening a book, or should I say, entering a library of tea history. Beyond the wonderful flavours in the cup, Darjeeling tea gives us a remarkable opportunity to discover a wonderful heritage and tradition.

Sustainable Philosophy

We prioritize collaborating with tea plantations that practice sustainable, organic farming. This involves allowing the tea plants to remain the way Mother Nature intended them to be. This involves playing by her rules.

At a lush tea plantation on the outskirts of Mirik, a misty hill town which is bestrode by the Indian-Nepal border, organic farming isn’t something to be adopted. It’s simply the way things are done. And while there are a myriad of reasons, first and foremost it is because of a philosophical approach to the human-environmental relationship, which is based on respect. There are no chemicals or fertilisers used in their farming process, but instead use what Mother Nature gives them.

Creating an organic plantation means maintaining one. A key element of staying organic is staying away from poisonous pesticides and fertilisers, which speed up the natural growth of the tea bushes. Synthetic farming is hugely detrimental to Mother Nature. One hard fact about organic tea farming is that it’s not the most profitable way to farm. Organic production may be half that of a synthetic farm, but the soil is not deteriorated for future generations.

If you look at the world, there is a slow movement from synthetic food to organic food. People have had enough of being fed chemicals and enough abuse to Mother Nature. It is time we go back to living as co-inhabitants in this world. And a world moving towards organic farming.

In our Chiya Bari organic tea estate which I opened in 2017, the wild weeds that sprout at the base of the tea bushes are composted to create organic nutrition for the tea plants. We also use neem seeds and lemongrass leaves, which are crushed, mixed with water and used as organic pesticide to keep the harmful pests away.

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By eliminating fertilisers and pesticides, organic plantations allow the tea bushes to flow slowly with slower growth that allows the tea bushes to feed on all the nutrients they need, to grow strong.
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In another of our source plantations, the source of a mighty river provides natural irrigation, but is also host to a hydro-electrical vortex, which will generate the first fossil-fuel-free plantation in the world in the next two years.

Some plantations go beyond their calling to participate in programs that will contribute to the wellbeing of the entire region. One plantation participates in a reforestation program, which contributes to the planting of thousands of new trees per year to protect local wildlife and give homes to wild deer, leopards, flocks of exotic birds and thousands of butterflies.

Culture in a Cup

Sustainably grown teas also depend on a dedicated and skilled workforce, and an understanding of their history and the customs of the people who call the tea plantation home.

A wonderful example are the Gurkha people who have lived in Darjeeling for six generations. Originally Hindu, today the population is a harmonious melting pot of Buddhists and Christians with sprawling monasteries and steeples dotted around Mirik. These people have been living on tea plantations for five generations, with women taking the role as tea pluckers in the field, a millennia-old tradition since tea cultivation began. Handpicking permits tea planters to select the best two-leaves-and-a-bud, and causes no damage to the tea bushes.

These workers live in colourful blue, yellow, green-painted houses, all spotlessly clean with vegetable gardens and potted plants serving as decorative stoops. Always, there is a nearby cow, which each worker owns to provide milk and also fertilizer for organic compost, often donated by the plantations to ensure milk is available for the children and the surplus can be sold for income. The Gurkha people rely little on outside influence, seldom leaving the remote region. They grow their own food, sing, dance in the evenings.

Beyond the remarkable flavours in the teacup, tea is a journey and a discovery of a wonderful heritage and tradition, an experience like no other that will bring people back, time and again, in search of the intangible qualities of TWG Tea.