Here's an intersting article from 2003 that says that the planters in Darjeeling are not investing enough in replanting their tea trees and that the tea is becomeing more inferior, therefore why protect the name of Darjeeling (meaning Darjeeling tea has to be produced in Darjeeling to be called that) instead of letting people buy "Darjeeling" tea from other places than Darjeeling.
Discuss if you like
Melinda
While not knowing much about conditions in the Darjeeling gardens, I was puzzled by an assertion the author makes that's crucial to his whole case. He says that old tea trees produce crops that are both smaller and lower in quality, and seems to think that this is obvious, for he doesn't try to support it with evidence.
For all I know, the yield may decline with age. There may also be something about Darjeeling that causes quality to decline with age, but this certainly isn't universally true. The idea that quality goes down with tree age would be laughed at in Wuyi or the Puerh tea mountains of Yunnan.
/Lew
Lewis snipped-for-privacy@panix1.panix.com12/14/04 10: snipped-for-privacy@panix.com
...not to mention, Brooklyn. Of course, the decline in quality with the age of the tree makes sense if you define quality as the taste you would expect from the leaf of young trees. David Hoffman told me once that part of the value of an old tree was the depth of its roots that enables it to pull minerals out of the sub-strata not available to its youthful counterpart. The thing to do is to trot over to Darjeeling, pick out a couple old trees, and direct the production of some tea from their leaves. Ripon, where are you?
Michael
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