Tea is water bewitched”, declared the famed Chinese philosopher Lu Wa.
As a tea tasting trainee, I was baffled by its intricacies. Tea comes in many avatars according to its geographic location — Darjeeling, Assam, Nilgiri, Annamalai, Travancore, Waynad, and so on.
A taster’s task is to describe the dry leaf as he sees it—its colour black, brown or reddish. Despite the fact that it was the English who gave tea tasting its professional aura, the preferred colour is black, supporting the dubious belief that the Brits were not racial! The leaf is described in near human terms—ragged, neat, coarse, stylish—the only ‘mod’ term that has not infiltrated the taster’s jargon, is ‘sexy’ although a long wiry leaf with a twirl, may soon be called that.
The infused leaf tells him what to expect from the liquor (is it going to be brisk, dull, flat or soft?) while the actual imbibing onto his palate gives the taster the characteristics of the brew: is it dull or brisk, high-fired, smoky, chesty, tainted, under or over withered, strong, weak, does it carry a foreign taint? A taster is expected to take all this into consideration, in a matter of seconds, and then describe and value it.
About 40 years on, after some million sip swirl and spits, I am still bewitched, beguiled and besotted by this seemingly insipid brew; nobody is ever the master of this art.
That tea originated from China is an established fact, the Chinese have woven many folklore tales of how the beverage was discovered—too numerous to recount in a ‘minutes column’.
On a recent family holiday in Dubai, we happened to go to the Mirdiff Mall on a shopping visit where I came across a Chinese stall with a prominent signboard offering ‘Complimentary Tea Tasting’.
Unable to resist this offer I went up to the Filipino hostess who laid out a batch of Chinese specialty teas for me—Samurai Chai Maté, Watermelon Mint Chiller, Raspberry Lemon Maté and Chinese Ayurveda Chai, all of which was absolutely Greek to me even after all these years of dabbling with it. I must confess that to my waning taste buds, none of them carried a semblance of Camellia Sinensis (the botanical name for tea). I was particularly interested in the Chinese Ayurvedic Chai, the label of which expounded its numerous health benefits.
The Chinese have thus encroached not just into Aksai Chin, but into an area we believed and cherished as our own for millennia—the Vedas!