SMC had invited my wife and I up to the hill country to see tea gardens, but we'd agreed that before that SMC and I would have an intense tea session in his office in Calcutta.
So our friendship moved into the three-dimensional world during a six-hour tea session. We drank a bunch of the teas I'd brought: oolongs, greens, and Puerhs. They were all good, but we both agreed that the best one we tasted that day was the yellow: Meng Ding Huang Ya from Imperial Tea Court. Interestingly, while he hadn't asked specifically for that tea, yellow was the tea category SMC had been most eager for me to bring in the email exchanges before the trip.
Why yellow tea? Well, don't be surprised when the first Darjeeling yellow tea becomes available, for they're actively working on it.
Beyond that, it became clear from our wide-ranging talk as we drank tea that SMC had been busy for a long time trying to see how he might be able to teach Darjeeling leaf to do new things. He's read a lot of scientific literature, and it's clear to me that his mind spends a lot of time shifting among chemistry, physics, and traditional tea-man lore, wondering, for example, what traditional tea manufacturing steps and techniques actually achieve and how they might be recombined to advantage.
We also laughed a lot during our long tasting session. It was one of the most memorable tastings I've ever had.
That afternoon, there was something I hadn't expected. I thought that by coming in late February we'd be too early for the first flush. But then Samir Changoiwala (SMC's son, and a director of the company) asked if I wanted to taste a cup of the first day's production of the year, still not enough to make an invoice, from (necessarily) the lowest-elevation garden of their three in Darjeeling. Uh, yes! I tasted it, and thought it was brilliant.
/Lew