Infused Read online

  HENRIETTA LOVELL

  INFUSED

  ADVENTURES IN TEA

  Don’t ask for the true story;

  why do you need it?

  It’s not what I set out with

  or what I carry.

  What I’m sailing with,

  a knife, blue fire,

  luck, a few good words

  that still work, and the tide.

  Margaret Atwood, ‘True Stories’

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Map of Locations

  Preface

  1: The Solway Firth, South-West Scotland

  2: Fuding, Fujian, China

  3: Claridge’s Hotel, London

  4: Guizhou, China

  5: A Diversion: How English Breakfast Became the New Black

  6: London, England: Camden to Whitehall

  7: Satemwa Estate, Malawi

  8: West Hollywood, California, USA

  9: Cederberg Mountains, South Africa

  10: Kyoto, Japan

  11: Hile, East Nepal

  12: Taitung, Taiwan

  13: South of Rome, Italy

  14: A Diversion: The Story of Afternoon Tea

  15: Tokyo, Japan

  16: Tarrytown, New York State, USA

  17: San Francisco and Sonoma County, California, USA

  18: Meghalaya, India

  19: The Wuyi Shan, China

  20: Paris, France

  21: Sikkim, India

  22: Nordskot, Arctic Norway

  23: Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, China

  24: New Orleans, Louisiana, USA

  25: Shizuoka, Japan

  26: Ambadandegama, Uva Highlands, Sri Lanka

  27: Michoacán, Mexico

  28: Cornwall, England

  29: Tarragona, Spain

  30: Glastonbury, Somerset, England

  31: Your Bedroom

  32: Fujian, China

  33: Eskdalemuir, South-West Scotland

  34: Revolution

  Postscript: Over the North Sea

  Making a Good Cup of Tea

  Teas I’ve Talked About

  Acknowledgements

  Plates

  About the Author

  Copyright

  MAP OF LOCATIONS

  PREFACE

  From the Shire Highlands of Malawi, across the foothills of the Himalayas, to hidden gardens of the Wuyi Shan, China, I make my way across the world, hunting for the most extraordinary tea, the leaves of Camellia sinensis. Beyond tea, I seek out rare herbs and flowers, from the pale Marcona almond blossom in Spain to rust-red rooibos of the semi-arid deserts of the South African Cederberg.

  I never stop searching. In 2004 I started a small, independent tea business based in London, Rare Tea Company, to share my discoveries. Over the years I’ve fallen in love so many times, with so many teas. I’m fickle but resolutely loyal. I never un-love. I’m not sure how that’s done. Once I have given my heart to something, or someone, I can’t undo it, so I keep going back, and ever onwards.

  When I’m not visiting farmers and gardens, my travels take me to my customers. This has led me to some of the best restaurants, past smooth tablecloths and the cool of dining rooms, into the heat and clamour of the kitchens, and to the most fascinating chefs in the world. Tea has introduced me to builders, tattoo artists, teachers, actors, athletes, perfumers, hoteliers, sommeliers, baristas, fishermen, pilots and bartenders. They have become friends and collaborators. My life has become consumed by the finding and blending and sharing of the most delicious things I can find to infuse. Rather aptly, it’s got me into a fair amount of hot water along the way.

  This is the story of my adventures in tea. I hope to seduce you, a little, into a love of loose leaves. It’s a highly personal, partisan account rather than an objective treatise on tea in general. It’s my story of tea, not the story of tea. I want to tell you about the really good stuff that fuels me, and the places it takes me. There is so much I long to share, you could think of this book as an unburdening of my loves.

  It might sound intimidating to venture off completely alone in an unknown country, not speaking a word of the language. But after the initial testing of your newborn giraffe legs, it can be the opposite. It’s complete freedom. No one knows you. You know nothing. Nothing is expected of you. Anything could happen.

  I have made a life for myself that necessitates embarking on adventures. I can’t be sure if this desire catalysed my tea love, but it certainly enables it. The question I’m most often asked is how it happened, how I became the Tea Lady. People really do call me that: it’s what I do and who I am. I’ve been pursuing tea for so long now, I have almost forgotten any other life or where the Tea Lady starts and I stop. There is still so much more out there to learn and discover. I’ve just begun, though time spools behind me, untidily. Turning a corner in my mind, it’s often a shock to find how deeply I’ve ventured in, the path I’ve taken lost in a tangle of leaves.

  Before tea I was working for a large multinational corporation, producing financial documentation. I know – it sounds fascinating, doesn’t it? Shareholder reports, IPO prospectuses and merger agreements aren’t great topics for conversations over dinner. I had plans to do something else, something I could be proud of, maybe start a tea company, but later. Then my father got cancer. He was sixty-five; he had plans.

  I returned home to London from a life in New York and spent my time in the hospital with him, often curled up on the end of his bed. I laid my head down and he stroked my hair. The cancer spread rapidly to his brain. We reversed roles and I sat beside his bed and stroked his hair. It snowed big, fluffy, cinematic flakes over the Royal Marsden Hospital the afternoon he took his last, rasping breath. He died within three months of being diagnosed. I decided not to go back to corporate life, not to delay any longer before plunging into the world of tea.

  When I got cancer myself, two years later, just as I was starting Rare Tea Company, it certainly disabused me of the notion that I had time to waste.

  I had gleaned a great deal from my years in the corporate world. My job had taken me across the world. I knew how to get things done, and the kind of business I didn’t want to be in. I didn’t subscribe to cronyism, old boys’ clubs or the tacit understanding that ethics come second to share value. I wanted to get involved in something that actually meant something to people’s lives. I couldn’t just sit passively in the dress circle any longer, looking down at the action on the stage. I set out to work directly with farmers, to travel to their homes, to understand their lives, to support them where I could; to move from grey corridors and windowless rooms full of paper to a vivid life of twisting mountain roads, emerald green gardens and cerulean skies.

  Conventional wisdom would have had me buy tea from a broker, stick it in a teabag, get some nice packaging and focus on the PR and marketing. But where would have been the adventure in that? I had fallen for a lovely leaf, not any old bag. Finding the best farms myself, and working on a direct-trade model, pitched me into the complexities of global shipping, without the support of a buying team or a transportation department – without anyone, at the start. New routes to market had to be created at both ends, from supplier to customer. Back in 2004, few people in Britain were familiar with loose-leaf tea. My adventures were certainly not founded on the cold hard stare of common sense.

  CHAPTER 1

  THE SOLWAY FIRTH, SOUTH-WEST SCOTLAND

  My dreams of tea had been infusing, quietly, for some time. They started in the drawing room of a grand old lady, Diana, in a grey, granite house near the coast of south-west Scotland. I was perhaps five or six when I was old enough to hold a cup and saucer. Tea was poured along with Diana’s stories of India and served with great ceremony in f
ragile bone-china cups. I was surprised and happily terrified to be handed something so precious. I could have bitten right through the thin lip, crushed it up between my small teeth. The tea was Darjeeling – the name of a place far, far away that I could taste in sips, right there in Scotland, from the teapot twisted gleaming amber ropes. Scented steam rose from leaves picked on the slopes of hot mountains where monkeys swung, while I looked out at cold hillsides of rough grass and sheep.

  We spent all our holidays in Dumfriesshire, where we had family with space for cooped-up London children to run free. The village where my grandparents lived is called Beeswing and compared with the scruffy, terraced streets of south London, it was a fairy tale of a place. We would pile out of the car, its interior opal blue with cigarette smoke after the eight-hour drive, to find a farm, rough-tongued calves with velvet creases behind their ears, and woods thick with wet bracken. We visited the rest of the family in turns for tea. Children were sent to play in the snow or forage for gooseberries, raspberries or wild strawberries and make camps in the head-high bracken. The adults would drink tea until it was a respectable hour to start on the whisky.

  At Diana’s house it was different. We would be dressed in our best and have our fingernails scrubbed with a brush. At other family houses we might be given orange squash. Tea was reserved for the adults. But at Diana’s at teatime, only tea was served. Anything else but tea at teatime would have been absurd to Diana. We were offered a slice of cake but handed a cup of tea. I can still feel the rattle of the cup and saucer. I was terrified of spilling a drop on the pale blue drawing-room carpet or the canary yellow sofa. I was in silent awe of Diana. She had an imperious voice, which was copied by the grey African parrot that sat in the dining room window looking out over the crunching stones of the driveway.

  The tea was brought into the drawing room on a silver trolley. The delicate cups and saucers had hand-painted floral designs. I knew there was another tea service in the kitchen. That was the one I really loved, with its green dragons chasing each other around the cups. But sadly that was reserved for breakfast. It would be ridiculous to ask to use the breakfast china for afternoon tea.

  Diana always served Darjeeling. She was a daughter of the Raj and had grown up in India, spending the hot summer months in the cool hills of the tea country. She drank her tea without milk, and I copied her. It was golden, floral, bitter, grown-up and foreign, and I loved it. I loved it the way I loved whisky. They were exotic flavours reserved for the adults. Every child in my family was expected to bartend as soon as we could be trusted not to spill the drinks. But I would never have dreamt of drinking a whole glass. I only ever took a sip, as payment for my efforts.

  It seemed to me, as a small girl, quite extraordinary to be allowed my own cup of tea. I would drink it carefully, sitting quietly, waiting to be banished into the garden to pick fruit, or in winter to the floor in front of the fire to look at picture books of India.

  It was exquisite torture balancing the cup and saucer and a plate of cake on my lap, in my good dress, itchy with smocking. The cake was nice, but I’d eat it as quickly as possible to get it out of the way, to concentrate on my tiny sips of tea. It tasted of tigers and elephants, of men wearing bright jewels and silk turbans, of green mountains and adventure.

  It wasn’t until my late twenties that I truly fell, weak-kneed, for another tea. It was an oolong I can still taste, drunk on board a junk in the harbour of Hong Kong, where I was on a work trip for my corporate job. The night city spread upwards before me in static neon fireworks, the black water beneath silent and still, reflecting the lights. The oolong was a Tie Guan Yin, an ‘Iron Goddess of Mercy’. She has taken me on many adventures since she first floored me that night with her beauty. I was caught, irretrievably, in a wonderful, lifelong pursuit.

  The interim between Diana and the junk had been filled with mugs I couldn’t remember. I had thought all tea was much of a muchness. I’d forgotten about Diana, long dead, and the grey parrot in the window, and the Darjeeling. But with a sip of that oolong it all came pouring back. I remember the moment so clearly because, despite the harbour lights and the glittering towers, I found myself elsewhere – perched on the edge of a canary yellow sofa. I deeply regretted all the years I’d been missing out on so much pleasure.

  You know the feeling when you refind a favourite book, long forgotten, or a brilliant film not seen for decades, or when a song resurfaces; the pleasure comes flooding back. I hadn’t just forgotten the song, I’d forgotten the band ever existed.

  Since then, tea has been my soundtrack and my narrative. I dream about tea when I’m not drinking it. It’s there beside me, my most constant companion. I can’t conceive of a morning, let alone a day, without it. To be deprived of tea would be a terrible torture I could not endure. But I have only felt this way, this obsessively, since I discovered the really good stuff. It’s like realising there is more to coffee than instant granules. Like tasting a steak when you have only known industrially produced burgers. Like a chunk of Lincolnshire Poacher, a slice of Brie or a crumble of Parmesan after a lifetime of individual slices of orange cheese wrapped in plastic. You simply cannot compare a mug of industrially produced teabag tea with a cup made from loose leaves, handpicked and hand-crafted.

  It happened on a junk in Hong Kong. And in the years that followed I began to investigate and explore. I travelled to the great tea-producing areas of the world and to some of the tiny, forgotten ones. I hunted for new terroirs of tea. I spoke to farmers and factory managers, to experts, masters and pluckers, to teashop managers and waitresses and pretty much everybody I could find whose life was tea. Now it is mine. It did take me years to get here. I dithered. In Scotland they would say I faffed. I faffed big time.

  As the snow turned to rain on Wandsworth Common, we buried my father in a coffin made of cardboard that I had painted, just as he’d asked, to look like his lifelong brand of cigarettes. It was a deep red that I had carefully varnished and edged with gold leaf. Standing by his graveside, I determined to stop faffing. I would throw myself into the world of tea, headlong.

  CHAPTER 2

  FUDING, FUJIAN, CHINA

  All tea comes from the Camellia sinensis bush, which, left alone and unplucked, would grow into a sprawling, leggy tree. Where it grows, how you care for it, when and how you harvest, and most importantly how you craft the leaf, determines the type of tea it will become. From the same leaf you could make a white, green, oolong, black or pu’er tea. Pu’er is fermented. Black tea is fully oxidised to bring out rich, tannic depth. Green tea is only lightly processed to reveal more subtle, vegetal flavours. Oolong lies artfully between the two. But white tea … White tea is the beginning, the untouched leaf, just dried and so retaining the softest notes of the fresh leaf, clean and grassy.

  White tea is the start of the spectrum, the start of my adventures in tea and how I start each day – with my bed tea. Bed tea could, of course, refer to any tea drunk in bed. You might think of a cold-Sunday-afternoon-in-winter-with-a-book sort of tea. The warm cup held to your chest as darkness disappears the room beyond the pool of light from the bedside lamp. That’s indisputably a very good time for tea, but the bed tea I’m referring to here is that first cup of tea in the morning. The one that you take back to bed, or if you’re lucky, the one that’s brought to you. That cup you drink with eyes half closed, in stillness. First thing, I like to take my buzz more like a bumblebee than a bluebottle.

  It’s almost always White Silver Tip. There are variations, of course; I don’t always wake up in the same place, in the same country, in the same bed. But when I’m at home, it’s my first desire. I live near a church with a clocktower. The old bells gently chime each hour. In good times I wake to their soft peal and turn off the alarm before it harries me.

  The kettle sits beside the kitchen tap. I empty it of water left flat and oxygen depleted and refill it with just enough for my teapot. I don’t have to look as the water flows into the kettle; I have done thi
s so many times, I know when to stop. Unless it is deep midwinter and the sky blind black, I don’t even turn on the lights. I have a temperature-controlled kettle that I can set to the desired degree, but I am now so intimate with the sound of the water that I can hear when it reaches the ideal temperature.

  While the kettle rumbles, I spoon tea into my cupped hand, judging the measure of it, feeling the silky silver buds before letting them fall into the teapot. I place the pot beside the cup on a small tray decorated with a picture of silver birch trees. I stand there for a moment, looking down at my feet on the white-painted floorboards, my eyes adjusting, listening. When the water whispers to me that it’s ready, I pour it into the teapot and return to bed.

  I pour half a cup and hold it between both hands, bringing it up to my face to breathe in the tea before tasting it. The aromas of cut grass and sun-warmed hay transport me to the mountains of Fujian, to the town of Fuding and the smell of the freshly picked tea drying on bamboo frames. I sip the hot tea, gazing without focus over the roofs and up at the sky. Birds glide by.

  My search for White Silver Tip was one of my very first tea adventures. Every morning I’m right back at the start, high in the mountains of Fujian, south-east China. To get to the tea gardens of Fuding, the most famous place in the world for white tea, you had to make a long journey that seemed as much through time as space. The first time I went, at the very start of the twenty-first century, the road was very old and winding.

  Before my Tea Lady life, my job took me to China, just as the country was starting to open up a little. I got the chance to visit impossible places I had only read about.

  Imagine you’re obsessed with wine. You’ve read every book you can find and you’ve talked incessantly with every expert you’ve managed to meet, but you’ve never seen a vine. There’s been a revolution in France – not so hard to envisage – and the borders have been closed for a century or more. You might have seen Paris, but for generations it’s been virtually impossible to visit the countryside. The famed vineyards of Champagne and Bordeaux are just stories, the Loire Valley a fairy tale. The old techniques and craftsmanship sound like fables as they drift further into the past.