The makers of English wine have hit their straps. My choice would be Gusbourne Wine. There are others, benefiting from warmer summers. Almost as good as champagne.
Almost…
The New York Times reports that landowners in England are now also looking beyond grapes at other crops previously ruled out by climate.
“It was an overcast morning in August, and the humid air hanging over a gentle east-facing slope in England felt unnervingly tropical.
“You could be in Sri Lanka,” said Mark Wyatt with dozens of plant rows stretched in front of us. Mr. Wyatt, the owner of 100 acres of land in Sussex, explained that this particular hillside, positioned between a nearby reservoir and a wood, inhabited a strange atmospheric pocket that trapped moisture.
“That happens to be ideal for the cultivation of his new crop: Camellia sinensis, more commonly known as tea…”.
“I thought we could create something interesting, something special,” Mr. Wyatt added.
So a whim means land originally home to livestock now has tea bushes.
In 2015, the French house of Champagne Taittinger bought an English vineyard in Kent. Then seven years later, a first bottle of sparkling wine.
You’d imagine a tea plantation will be looking at an investment in land like Mr. Wyatt’s acres.
Except, why would you?
Champagne houses which buy land in the UK know the appellation system means production outside Burgundy can never carry the name of that nurtured in the mother region. Champagne will always be Champagne.
I’d say the same about Darjeeling.
For me, second flush, harvested in May ahead of Monsoon that yields “Rain tea”, is supreme. More body than that which comes first from leaves picked just a few weeks before. Ratan Mondal, founding father of Tea2you describes more than 300 varieties of leaf, brownish-black with a few silver tips, only a little tannin. “The sweet touch of muscatel is a delight,” he maintains.
At Borough Market, Tea2you’s HQ, Ratan gives me a postcard of him on the slopes in Darjeeling. He is momentarily lost for words (meaning as his writer in residence, I am, too).
To be there in March, he sighs…
Darjeeling; the champagne of teas.
— Colin Cameron
Writer in Residence