By Sourish Bhattacharyya
ANAMIKA SINGH
is the child of tea. Her father, Abhai
Singh, a 46-year veteran of the tea industry, was at one point consulting
with 20 tea gardens and five top companies. She grew up in the tea gardens of
West Bengal, studied in tea country (St Helen’s Convent, Kurseong) and joined
her father to get “my hands dirty” straight out of school. By then, her father
had bought a 650-acre tea estate at Manjhee
Valley, Dharamsala (in the shadow of the Dalai Lama’s spiritual
headquarters and the mighty Dhauladhar mountains in the north-western state of
Himachal Pradesh), producing mainly for the export market.
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| Anamika Singh with a neatly packed can of infusion at the Anandini Himalaya Tea Boutique at Shahpur Jat, New Delhi |
Her range includes seven infusions
(she’ll add another three or four when winter formally arrives), which aren’t
your run-of-the-mill teabag types. She has married the Manjhee Valley First
Flush with lavender flowers and lemongrass, the autumn tea with rose petals and
lemon balm, and green tea with chamomile and rose hip, rhododendron or
pomegranate flowers and Himalayan tulsi
(holy basil), rose petals or fire flame bush and mint. She’s also working to
develop a blend of black and green teas.
The First Flush, Anamika says, is flowery
on the nose and greener on the palate than its Darjeeling cousin, and
surprisingly, it matures like a wine. This tea is most popular in Germany and France,
and when buyers came recently from the two countries, Anamika surprised them
with the 2008 First Flush, whose taste had evolved magnificently. “These teas
are longer lasting,” she insists.
Anamika says she first imagines a
flavour and then sets out to create it, and it turns out exactly the way she
imagined it. It reminds me of a memorable line that would keep coming up in conversations
with Bernard de Laage de Meux, marketing
and communication director of Chateau
Palmer, the well-known Bordeaux Third Growth, during his recent visit to India.
“Wines,” he would say, “are all about the intention.”
You can’t escape wine analogies when
you’re talking about Anamika’s teas, especially the hand-made ones that don’t
come into contact with any machines. It takes eight to ten women, hand-rolling individual
sets of two leaves and a bud for eight hours at a stretch, to produce just
three kilos of tea. And hand-made teas are rolled only in the months of March
and April, so it shouldn’t surprise you that they are priced between Rs 700 and
Rs 1,200 for 35 gm at Anamika’s store. I asked Anamika how many grams of tea
leaves go into making a standard cup of tea. “Two grams,” she said. You can’t hope
to get more than 17 cups from a pouch of hand-made tea!
It reminded me of the garagistes, the
Bordeaux winemakers who produce very limited quantities of wine that command
very high prices because of their quality and rarity. I was first introduced to
these wines by my well-connected English friend, Mark Walford, at the estate of none other than Jacques Thienpont, the Belgian who created Le Pin, which in certain
years is the most expensive wine in the world because the production never
exceeds 7,200 to 8,400 bottles per day. A passionate paraglider, Thienpont, who
also owns the fine Bordeaux estate named Vieux Chateau Certan, came to India
some years back to check out the skies of Pune. And if Thienpont can ask for
the moon for his wine, Anamika can surely charge Rs 700 for 35 gm of
hand-rolled tea.
Ironically, diagonally opposite
Anandini, which is next to Bookwise in the Shahpur Jat maze, a pub named
Chapter 36 is all set to open. I wonder whether they’ll serve tea, but I don’t
see Anamika’s patrons washing an infusion down with a lager. Why seek alcohol
when you can imbibe Anandini teas?
