Even though I normally drink green tea, I just ordered four ounces of Muscatel Valley Estate 2007, a first flush black Darjeeling, from inpursuitoftea.com . Then at silvertipstea.com I found Organic Makaibari Estate FTGFOP1S 2007, first flush, and ordered some of that too.
The Makaibari tea is not the estate’s famed “muscatel,” which, according to Matt Gross in “High Tea, India Style,” (The New York Times, Sunday, October 14, 2007, Travel, pp. 1, 8-9) is “the most expensive brew in Darjeeling.” At auction in Beijing last year, it “sold for 50,000 rupees a kilogram (about $555 a pound, at recent exchange rates of around 41 rupees to the dollar)...” But I also ordered a second flush Makaibari muscatel that, according to the Silver Tips website, has “an exquisite aroma.” So I’ll see. (For more on muscatel teas, see comments to the September 28, 2007 post at Tea Nerd.)
Last March Gross visited three of the 78 tea estates “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.” Makaibari, a organic, biodynamic tea estate founded in the 1840s, was memorable, not only for its exceptional tea, but also for the outsize personality of owner Rajah Banerjee, “a vigorous patrician with thick gray hair, a clean-shaven angular jaw and black eyebrows in permanent ironic arch.” Gross's first cup of tea--"bright but mellow, with a faint fruity sweetness that lingered on my tongue"--was "the first of many perfect cups."
Gross also sipped tea at Glenburn and Goomtee, two other Darjeeling estates. At Goomtee, he trekked four and a half miles to Muscatel Valley, where the estate’s organic teas are grown. “….Muscatel Valley was positively prehistoric, with massive stone outcroppings and lonely fields of tea bushes stretching into the Jurassic distance. Sunlit mist shrouded the far mountains, and all traces of civilization vanished. There was nothing but me and the tea.”
If this is all too enticing, you can find information on how to get there and where to stay in the sidebar, “Tea Anyone?”
Silver Tips Tea, incidentally, is owned by Rajah Banerjee’s sister-in-law, Anupka. To see her story, go here.