Tuesday, September 1, 2009
recent trip to S. Yunnan, wild vrs cultivated leaves
ft on african auctions
The auctioneer patters, the bids fly, the banter sharpens, the tension rises. Just a few seconds have passed, then bang. The hammer strikes and the package is sold. On to the next one.
It’s a rapid-fire process repeated thousands of times every week in the Kenyan port city of Mombasa, where east Africa’s tea crop is sold in an auction so fast, a deal can be done in the space of an ill-timed sneeze.
What traders do has global implications because Kenya is the world’s top black tea exporter and the auction, which handles tea from the rest of east Africa too, is the world’s largest. For those reasons, Mombasa has become to tea what the New York Mercantile Exchange is to oil and the London Metal Exchange is to copper: the place where a global benchmark price is set.
That’s why the world cared last week when average wholesale prices for the best black tea, broken pekoe 1, jumped to an all-time high of $3.97 a kilogramme, up almost 40 per cent since January due to the impact of droughts on global output.
With so much at stake, the Mombasa traders sit poised in a predatory arc around the auctioneer, showing off the sharp shirts, chunky watches, quick minds and killer instincts common to commodity trading floors across the world.
Tea port plucked from obscurity
Kenya’s tea auctions have evolved from their humble start half a century ago, when the country was just a secondary market for tea not consigned for the London auction, the centre of tea trading for most of the last century. Now Kenya has become the world’s largest auction, pricing more than 35 per cent of global tea exports, writes Javier Blas.
London has retained its leadership on the tropical commodities that developed exchange-traded futures – sugar, cocoa and coffee. Kenya auctions started in November 1956 in Nairobi and moved in 1969 to the port city of Mombasa. Rising tea imports around the world reinforced Mombasa’s position, leading to the closure of the London tea auction in 1998.
The introduction of bidding in US dollars in 1992 was a catalyst for Mombasa’s development, as it mitigated the risk of a devaluation of local African currencies. That was particularly important as the auction was by that stage handling the produce not only of Kenya, the world’s largest tea exporter, but also of eastern African countries, including Uganda, Burundi, and Rwanda.
In addition to Mombasa, there are auctions in Colombo in Sri Lanka, handling about 25 per cent of the world’s exports; Kolkata and Guwahati in India, accounting for 15 per cent; Jakarta in Indonesia; Chittagong in Bangladesh and Blantyre in Malawi.
But while they need the traditional wiles and wits of a hustler, that is only half of the job for members of the East Africa Tea Trade Association. They must also have the refinement of a wine connoisseur.
Why? Because although every commodity trader needs to know the science of his asset, tea is a subtle creature whose varied tastes can only be appreciated after years of palate practise by the men, and a few women, in Mombasa.
They must be as soft tongued as they are hard nosed. They spend as much time swilling tea in their mouths – their version of price discovery – as they do buying it. A better name for their profession would be taster-trader.
And their decisions affect the retail prices paid by drinkers of sweet brews in Cairo, milky cuppas in London and iced tea in Los Angeles.
While coffee, cocoa or sugar come in just a few standard grades and trade on futures exchanges in London and New York, tea pricing is a more delicate art, better suited for an auction, because “every lot is different”, says Naveed Ariff, general manager of Global Tea & Commodities, a trading company in Mombasa.
Quality varies according to the rainfall, altitude, soil nutrients and plucking standards of each estate. “Tea processed in the morning can be different from tea processed in the afternoon,” says Mr Ariff. “Every factory will have seven or eight grades. And there are hundreds of factories.”
The biggest producers in Africa are James Finlay, Unilever and the Kenya Tea Development Authority – which represents half a million individual farmers – and each one delivers tea from its rural factories to a selling broker in Mombasa.
The broker sends samples of each batch to several dozen buyers two weeks ahead of auction. That is when the taster-traders head to the laboratories, where they quaff them and decide how much to bid on behalf of the world’s tea retailers.
Unilever is a buyer as well as a producer, and its taster-traders sample 1,500 tea packages a day for four days a week. One of them is Nimrod Taabu, who moves down a line of cups making a violent slurping noise as he sucks up tea from a spoon.
The technique ensures the tea spreads around his mouth so he tastes not just with his tongue but with his inner cheeks, the roof of his mouth and his throat. The noise, he concedes, “is definitely something the Queen would not be proud of”.
He spits the tea into a basin after four or five seconds, but in that time he can identify faults – like a weed caught up with the leaves – and assess viscosity and “dissolved solid content”, “mouth feel” and “floral tones”.
Armed with their conclusions, the taster-traders then head to the auction where 11 selling brokers take the auctioneer’s seat in rotation and read out offer prices for their 40kg and 60kg packages. Last week, a total of 5m kg was on sale.
When several buyers want the same tea – and on this occasion the strongest demand is for high quality – they will yell “up, up” to bid two cents higher. For less popular teas, a buyer will start with a bid several notches below the offer price.
Sometimes no bids come in at all. “Then we’re sweating in there,” said one auctioneer. “Because that means your package has no value in the international market.”
Francis Kiragu, chairman of the East Africa Tea Trade Association and a Unilever director, says traders need to be able to read each others’ strategies. “The competitive edge is whether you can formulate your blend at a better price than your rivals so you can undercut them in the market place.”
The auction can get boisterous, but it never descends into a screaming match. India’s tea sales are different, says Mr Ariff: “By the time you come home every day, your throat is gone after all the shouting you’ve done.”
In Mombasa, however, throats need to be preserved for tasting, because as Mr Kiragu says: “That is the point where you get it right or wrong.”
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
WSJ on Tea Ceremony (JAPAN)
New York
The tea ceremony is said to be the essence of Japanese aesthetics -- architecture, ceramics, flower arranging, incense, calligraphy, painting, gardening -- packaged in a formalized ritual that dates back to the 16th century. That's when the illustrious tea master Sen no Rikyu perfected cha-do, or the "way of tea." It's a ceremony -- and, some would say, a state of mind -- that has changed very little in nearly half a millennium.
[Sen Sooku] Zina Saunders
Fast-forward 15 generations to a young man in a formal kimono kneeling on the floor of a newly constructed tea room at the Koichi Yanagi Oriental Fine Arts Gallery on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Sen So-oku, 33 years old, is the heir to the Mushakoji school of tea, one of the trio of competing schools founded by Sen no Rikyu's three great-grandsons. One day he will succeed his father as grand tea master. For now, he's spending a year in the U.S. as a representative of the Japanese Ministry of Culture and teaching art at Columbia University.
Mr. Sen wants to bring the tea ceremony into the 21st century. The first clue comes as I remove my shoes and step into the tea room that has been designed to his personal specifications. It's a what's-wrong-with-this-picture moment. The floor is covered with the usual straw mats, the kettle is warming on a brazier in the middle of the room, and the traditional tea-ceremony implements are laid out in the proper order near Mr. Sen. But wait -- what's that open trench that runs along one side of the room?
Call it a tea bleacher. Mr. Sen gestures to us to take our seats -- but not in the cramp-inducing, sit-on-your-knees posture that can make the tea ceremony a torturous experience for modern-day participants. Rather, the tea master invites us to sit on the floor and lower our legs into the trench. It's similar to the hole-in-the-floor seating arrangements at many Japanese restaurants outside Japan.
"This type of architectural structure serves two audiences," Mr. Sen says through an interpreter. "One is the new generation that is not necessarily used to sitting on their knees. The other is for people who have already had a long relationship with tea but are getting older [and] having trouble sitting on their knees." He has also designed a ceremony that can be performed in a room with a table and chairs.
Mr. Sen defends his approach, which traditionalists would call heretical. "Change is always a part of this cultural form," he says. The tea ceremony "changes along with the way life is carried out now." When the tea ceremony was invented, he notes, everyone wore kimonos and was used to living in tatami rooms. Today that's not the case. Four hundred years ago, there was "a very small difference between the concept of carrying out tea and everyday life." Today, he says, "The point is to be able to regain that short distance between life and the tea room."
At the same time, Mr. Sen stresses that "there are certain essential elements . . . of Japanese culture that can only be found in tea." He mentions "seasonality." Traditional Japanese culture, he says, "considers the focus on seasons -- understanding the differences between the seasons -- to be very important. So, for example, in Japan there is the concept of hanami, which is the viewing of the cherry blossoms. Or, for example, in autumn there's the concept of looking out at the moon. Of course, the moon is out all the time, but that's a specific celebration."
He tells the story of one of his students, an office worker in her 30s. "She works in Tokyo, a very cosmopolitan place. . . . In her day-to-day life, she gets up in the morning, takes the subway, gets off at a subway station, takes sort of an underground tunnel to work, gets into the office building, works all day and doesn't see a little bit of sunlight. And then, at the end of the day, she goes back and does the exact same thing" in reverse. For her, the tea ceremony "is really an opportunity to feel the seasonality of Japan."
Mr. Sen has woven several seasonal themes into today's tea ceremony. The flower motif on the incense burner is plum, a symbol of spring. The portrait on the scroll in the alcove is of Sen no Rikyu, the founder of the tea ceremony, the anniversary of whose death occurred a few days earlier.
Then there's the bowl in which Mr. Sen whisks the tea for me to drink. It was made in Kyoto in the 17th century, and Mr. Sen says he selected the bowl for me "because I wanted you to feel the historical lineage between it and the tea that we are experiencing today." It is a rustic, handmade Raku-ware bowl. Raku-ware was the first pottery "that was created specifically for the art and culture of tea," he says. "Before that, ceramics from China, as well as the Korean peninsula, were utilized."
The glaze on the bowl "has a very thick surface, but it also has a soft tactile sense," he explains. "As the hot tea permeates the thickness of the tea bowl, it's almost like the tea bowl will take on a sort of bodily temperature. So it's as if the tea bowl and the person drinking it will become one." That effect is further heightened by the bowl's color, he says, which is black. Before electricity, the tea room was much darker. And when someone drank from a Raku-ware bowl, it was as if the "existence of the tea bowl would be removed entirely, and the only thing there was the person drinking the tea, becoming one with the tea itself."
The tea ceremony is closely connected with Zen Buddhism, and Mr. Sen has trained as a monk in a temple in Kyoto. When he meditates, he says, "there is an opportunity for self-reflection, almost as if one sees oneself as well as an objective self viewing the self." This feeling is similar to what he experiences when he is performing the tea ceremony, he says.
"Tea provides an opportunity for self-reflection," Mr. Sen says, "for deepening human relationships. It's also an escape from the everyday." Which brings us to the readers of The Wall Street Journal. "You have a readership of important business people," he says, "who are very busy, who spend a lot of time at work." The first devotees of the tea ceremony were daimyo, or feudal lords, he says, who used the tea room to strike business deals and plot political moves. The modern-day analogue for business people is golf, he says.
But why not the tea ceremony? Tea is actually a "very simple pleasure," he says. Yes, it has a philosophical background, but at essence it is an "opportunity for people to experience good company, good food, good drink and good conversation." This, the master says, is the "charm of tea."
Ms. Kirkpatrick is a deputy editor of the Journal's editorial page.
Puer Bubble Bursts
MENGHAI, China — Saudi Arabia has its oil. South Africa has its diamonds. And here in China’s temperate southwest, prosperity has come from the scrubby green tea trees that blanket the mountains of fabled Menghai County.
Over the past decade, as the nation went wild for the region’s brand of tea, known as Pu’er, farmers bought minivans, manufacturers became millionaires and Chinese citizens plowed their savings into black bricks of compacted Pu’er.
But that was before the collapse of the tea market turned thousands of farmers and dealers into paupers and provided the nation with a very pungent lesson about gullibility, greed and the perils of the speculative bubble. “Most of us are ruined,” said Fu Wei, 43, one of the few tea traders to survive the implosion of the Pu’er market. “A lot of people behaved like idiots.”
A pleasantly aromatic beverage that promoters claim reduces cholesterol and cures hangovers, Pu’er became the darling of the sipping classes in recent years as this nation’s nouveaux riches embraced a distinctly Chinese way to display their wealth, and invest their savings. From 1999 to 2007, the price of Pu’er, a fermented brew invented by Tang Dynasty traders, increased tenfold, to a high of $150 a pound for the finest aged Pu’er, before tumbling far below its preboom levels.
For tens of thousands of wholesalers, farmers and other Chinese citizens who poured their money into compressed disks of tea leaves, the crash of the Pu’er market has been nothing short of disastrous. Many investors were led to believe that Pu’er prices could only go up.
“The saying around here was ‘It’s better to save Pu’er than to save money,’ ” said Wang Ruoyu, a longtime dealer in Xishuangbanna, the lush, tea-growing region of Yunnan Province that abuts the Burmese border. “Everyone thought they were going to get rich.”
Fermented tea was hardly the only caffeinated investment frenzy that swept China during its boom years. The urban middle class speculated mainly in stock and real estate, pushing prices to stratospheric levels before exports slumped, growth slowed and hundreds of billions of dollars in paper profits disappeared over the past year.
In the mountainous Pu’er belt of Yunnan, a cabal of manipulative buyers cornered the tea market and drove prices to record levels, giving some farmers and county traders a taste of the country’s bubble — and its bitter aftermath.
At least a third of the 3,000 tea manufacturers and merchants have called it quits in recent months. Farmers have begun replacing newly planted tea trees with more nourishing — and now, more lucrative — staples like corn and rice. Here in Menghai, the newly opened six-story emporium built to house hundreds of buyers and bundlers is a very lonely place.
“Very few of us survived,” said Mr. Fu, 43, among the few tea traders brave enough to open a business in the complex, which is nearly empty. He sat in the concrete hull of his shop, which he cannot afford to complete, and cobwebs covered his shelf of treasured Pu’er cakes.
All around him, sitting on unsold sacks of tea, were idled farmers and merchants who bided their time playing cards, chain smoking and, of course, drinking endless cups of tea.
The rise and fall of Pu’er partly reflects the lack of investment opportunities and government oversight in rural Yunnan, as well as the abundance of cash among connoisseurs in the big cities.
Wu Xiduan, secretary general of the China Tea Marketing Association, said many naïve investors had been taken in by the frenzied atmosphere, largely whipped up by out-of-town wholesalers who promoted Pu’er as drinkable gold and then bought up as much as they could, sometimes paying up to 30 percent more than in the previous year.
He said that as farmers planted more tea, production doubled from 2006 to 2007, to 100,000 tons. In the final free-for-all months, some producers shipped their tea to Yunnan from other provinces, labeled it Pu’er, and then enjoyed huge markups.
When values hit absurd levels last spring, the buyers unloaded their stocks and disappeared.
“The market was sensationalized on purpose,” Mr. Wu said, speaking in a telephone interview from Beijing.slide show:
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/01/16/world/asia/20090116-tea-audio/index.html
Wednesday, April 8, 2009
2009 Green Tea Arrives
It turns out the 2009 first picks of Green Tea taste too bitter because of the drought situation that began after the Olympics cloud seeding stopped. All across China there's been a drought. So no reporting on the first picking of green tea, but as the season rolls on, we may get some nice greens out of West and South China...
Wu Yi Yen Cha
Da Hong Pao is the most famous of the Fujian teas, the other being Tie Guan Yin (which should be spoken of in the fall). The most expensive of the Da Hong Pao trees are priceless, guarded by the army, numbering now 6 r 5 1/2 people sometimes say. It is from cuttings that the rest of the Da Hong Pao begins its journey to comsumer markets. And to hear tell, it is only way down the ladder that the tea is offered outside government circles to the general public for sale.
Having made the rounds to some of the better respected Wu Yi Tea Shops in the tea area of town, we performed the necessary "getting to know you" where they gave us fake teas, and the lower grade teas, and each one we had to sip, question their intelligence (always laughing), until they admitted they had none of their good teas yet. We have learned the Wu Yi Yen tea sells out very quickly. However, soon the 2009 teas will come in from Fujian and we will look forward to trying them with you!
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
French Chef's Tasting Tea (article)
By Richard Vines
Jan. 7, 2009. (Bloomberg) -- Pierre Gagnaire, the Michelin three- starred Parisian chef, is passionate about tea. It's an enthusiasm shared by Mourad Mazouz, with whom he co-owns Sketch, the exotic London venue where you might enjoy a pot of Earl Grey with bergamot oil.
The two joined forces for a blind tasting of store-supplied white, green and black varieties, prepared by Sketch's Japanese tea maker, Chie Nagao, who works with the care of a sommelier. Gagnaire and Mazouz are friends as well as business partners and laughed and chatted happily in French and English throughout the tasting of 12 teas, which lasted for about an hour.
Gagnaire and Mazouz both emphasized that a small variation in the ratio of leaves to water, the length of time in the pot or the water temperature might produce widely differing results. This occurred in the case of one entry, from Fortnum & Mason, which they asked to be remade after finding it too bitter.
Here's some of what they had to say and their marks out of 10, which they agreed by splitting the difference between their scores. Fortnum & Mason Plc was the winning retailer, while the top individual teas were from Fortnum and Selfridges Plc. The other entries came from Whittard of Chelsea Plc, bought by the private equity firm Epic on Dec. 23, and Harrods Department Store Co.
White Tea
WHITE TEA: Fortnum & Mason Peppermint & Yunnan, (100g), 15 pounds ($21.93):
MM: "It smells minty. It's what you drink when you're sick before you go to bed. Your grandmother will do that. That's my feeling, which is fine for the memory of your grandmother." PG: "It's good but it's not tea. It smells good and the taste isn't bad. It's the first time I've drunk something like that." 5/10.
Selfridges (Rare Tea Co.) White Silver Tip Tea, (25g), 6.99 pounds:
MM: "I want to look at the color of it. Ah yes. The smell is OK but there's no taste. It's complicated to judge because so much depends on how long it's been brewing before being served." PG: "There are so many variables." MM: "We are French, so we're not specialists, but we love tea. This one doesn't interest me personally." 4/10.
Harrods Jasmine Silver Needle China, 20 tea bags (36g), 7.95 pounds:
MM: "White tea needs to be delicate, subtle, not too strong: agreeable, comfortable in the mouth. This one I really like." PG: "I try in my restaurant in Paris to serve tea but it's so complicated. It depends on the water and even the quality of the pot. You should serve the same tea in the same pot. This one is pleasant. It's not harsh. It's a pleasure to drink." MM: "It's tea bags? Maybe we know nothing." (Laughs.) 7/10.
Whittard of Chelsea: Lemon Rose White Tea Silver Tips, (50g), 4.80 pounds:
PG: "The color is strange; very, very strange taste. It's lemon rose? It's much too strong for me. This isn't real white tea. It's a mixture of things." MM: "It's not bad but I'd never drink this. It sticks to the tongue. Not very pleasant. It has a very pleasant smell but to drink it, less so." 5/10.
Green Tea
GREEN TEA: Selfridges (Rare Tea Co.) Green Whole Leaf Tea, (25g), 5.99 pounds:
MM: "For me, it's too clear but it may not have infused enough. I drink green tea because it's hot water with a little bit of taste. This one, I think it's not a great quality of green tea but it's not bad. I will drink it." PG: "It's clean, drinkable." 5/10.
Harrods Gunpowder China tea, 20 tea bags (50g), 6.95 pounds:
PG: "You really need to categorize by price because if we mix many different teas, it's like boxing or golf or judging a Volkswagen against a Rolls Royce. We prefer the first one. This isn't straight. It's confusing in the mouth. It's a bit strong in taste but not strong in the mouth. The tea looks very dry." 4/10.
Whittard of Chelsea River Clouds Green Tea, (50g), 10.80 pounds:
MM: "I like it." PG: "Me, too." MM: "That, for me, is a green tea. It has a dry-leaf feeling but it's pleasant in the mouth. It sticks on the tongue in a nice way." PG, draining his cup: "I agree. It is well structured. It's proper green tea." 7/10.
Fortnum & Mason Gunpowder Green Tea, (125g), 6.25 pounds:
Mazouz said it was very, very bitter and he couldn't drink it, so they asked for a fresh pot. MM: "It's not bad now. I was going to score it 2/10 but now it is smooth and delicate. I wouldn't drink it before. Timing is everything. The temperature of the water is also very important." 6.5/10.
Black Tea
BLACK TEA: Harrods Darjeeling Castleton Muscatel, (50g), 15.95 pounds:
MM: "Not for me. Not bad but it's not my cup of tea. It's not memorable." PG: "I like it. It's a comfortable tea. You serve that with cakes. It's perfect for breakfast or afternoon tea." 6/10.
Whittard of Chelsea Badamtam First Flush Darjeeling, (125g), 8.50 pounds:
MM: "This one is more delicate, tasteful, smooth. It's agreeable: light, smooth and really pleasant in the mouth. Not too harsh. Good on the nose. But the infusion, the water, the timing are so important for tea. I like that. They made a lot of effort." PG: "It's a good tea." 7/10.
Fortnum & Mason Fortmason (black) tea scented with orange, (250g), 8.25 pounds:
MM: "Nice color. Smoky. What did they add? Orange? I don't get the orange. For me, it's more flowery." PG: "Nice taste. Very nice taste. Good. Very pleasant. It's Fortnum & Mason? I'm, pleased because I like them a lot. They make a lot of effort." 8/10.
Selfridges (Rare Tea Co.) Oolong China Tea, (50g), 6.99 pounds:
MM: "It doesn't seem like black tea." (He's right, it's halfway between green and black.) "I like it: very, very nice. It's a melange, very pleasant. Can you give us more?" PG: "It's good. Very nice." 8/10.
(Richard Vines is the chief food critic for Bloomberg News.)
To contact the writer on the story: Richard Vines in London at rvines@bloomberg.net.
