Tea pilgrimage: fields of Dooars

Very early on the morning of February 23, we pulled ourselves out of our sleeper berths. There was some more sweet railroad milk tea before our stop. We climbed down around first light. SMC's driver picked us up in a 4-wheel drive vehicle, and we were off for the tea estates.

But it wasn't Darjeeling; it was Dooars. This tea-growing region, east of the Darjeeling gardens and lower in altitude, was only a vague name to me, probably because you don't see Dooars tea sold in the West, at least not under its own name. The vast bulk of Dooars tea goes into the domestic - Indian - CTC market. Actually, it was high time to lose my haughtiness about CTC, but more on that later.

We drove to the Soongachi tea estate, whose manager's bungalow would be our home for two days. (An Indian tea estate's manager's bungalow, from my limited experience, is nothing like the small house suggested by the word "bungalow" in American parlance. The Soongachi bungalow is a huge old house with its own lovely ornamental garden, including a flowering vine climbing over the roof, in the middle of the tea fields.) The terrain of the fields is somewhat rugged, but not terribly hilly, going down to the Mal (sp?) river in the distance. Far away across the river are some serious hills.

The two days in Dooars were an intensive course for my wife and me in how tea is grown and manufactured. We followed SMC around as he checked on various parts of the tea fields, inspecting the results of pruning; the transplanting of new plants to fill in where a bush had died; the replacement of whole areas of bushes past their prime; the tall shade trees that limit the intense sunlight reaching the tea bushes; clearing big stones from the soil and other construction projects; the struggle against a couple of different pests that affect different parts of the bushes. At all times, SMC explained what he was looking for and how it fit into the whole process.

In the fields, essentially all the work is done by hand with simple, non-powered hand tools. This doesn't mean it's sloppy, though. Pruning is done to exacting standards of accuracy, so that a bush, during any harvest in the course of its life, will support as broad and dense as possible a "table" - as flat as that word suggests - of tender, and easily pluckable, leaves. To this end, the bush gets cut back periodically to force it to ramify and increase its yield at next plucking, but the big, heavy leaves of the "maintenance foliage" below the "table", whose photosynthesis supports the growth of the leaves that will be harvested, have to be protected.

Plucking is done by women, who, it is believed, are more careful and dexterous than men.

/Lew

Reply to
Lewis Perin
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I think Upton offered an estate Dooars about a year ago. I didn't get any because I got the impression from their description that it was similar to Assam, of which I am not a huge fan.

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Did you get a feel for the estate's pesticide use? Given a choice, I always opt for an organically grown tea.

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The same is true in China, I believe. I remember reading about a tea garden reserved for the emperor - the tea could only be harvested by women wearing silk gloves using gold scissors, and it was processed in such a way that no one actually touched the tea until the emperor himself drank it. Who knows if it's true, but it's a good story nonetheless.

Keep 'em coming, Lew.

Thanks, Dean

Reply to
DPM

No, I didn't find out about pesticide use on the two Dooars estates I visited. I might as well say now that of the two Darjeeling gardens I spent time at, Avongrove is organic and Rohini isn't.

/Lew

Reply to
Lewis Perin

The German online store Nur Natur

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has a small selection of organic Dooars teas from the Phutarjora estate. They had Dooars teas in their selection at least in the last five-six years.

Gyorgy

Reply to
Gyorgy Sajo

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