Region · in India
Darjeeling
Darjeeling is a small district of very steep Himalayan hillsides where almost everything is wrong for a plantation and right for a tea: too cold, too high, too vertical and far too low-yielding to compete on price. It is the one major Indian region planted with China-type bushes rather than Assam ones, which is why it tastes nothing like the rest of the country, and the one where an individual garden's name carries real value.
What grows here
Black tea in four distinct flushes is the classic output, from fewer than ninety registered gardens on the ridges around the town. Since the 2000s the same estates have diversified hard into green, white and oolong-style teas, usually made from the same bushes and the same pluck, partly as a response to falling black tea volumes. The estate name is the unit of trade here in a way it is nowhere else in India.
The ground
Gardens run from roughly 600 to 2,000 m on slopes steep enough that terracing is often impossible and pluckers work the hillside directly. Cold nights, persistent cloud and a heavy monsoon slow the bushes right down, and yields per hectare are a fraction of Assam's. The district also sits on thin, fragile soils with a serious erosion problem, which constrains how the gardens can be worked and is one reason so many of them went organic.
The bushes
The original plantings were China-type sinensis seed, and the surviving old China bushes are still on the hillsides, low-yielding and prized for aroma. Against them sit the modern clones, of which AV2 is the celebrated one, along with P312, B157 and the Takdah series. Darjeeling invoices actually state this, and 'clonal', 'China' or a named clone tells you a great deal about what is in the packet, which is unusual candour by the standards of the tea trade.
Harvest seasons
Four flushes, and here the flush is genuinely part of the product. First flush, from mid March, is pale, brisk and green-edged. Second flush, in May and June, is the darker, rounder muscatel tea the district is famous for, and that character is linked to leafhopper feeding on the leaf, the same mechanism behind Taiwan's Oriental Beauty. Monsoon leaf from July onwards is bulk material, and the autumnal flush in October and November is softer and less aromatic.
How it is made here
Darjeeling is sold as black tea and is not fully oxidised. First flush in particular is taken far less far than a conventional black tea, which is why the dry leaf still looks green, the liquor is pale and the tea behaves badly under boiling water. The withering is long and the rolling gentle, both aimed at aroma rather than strength. Anyone treating a first flush like an Assam will ruin it.
What to look for
Darjeeling is the most misused origin name in tea. It is protected as a geographical indication in India and in the EU, and the amount sold worldwide has long exceeded what the district physically produces. The label you want states the estate, the flush, the year, the grade and ideally the invoice number; a packet that says only 'Darjeeling' is a blend and may contain very little from here. Note also that grade letters like SFTGFOP describe leaf appearance and tip content, not quality, and mean nothing on their own.
How it got here
Planting began in the 1840s under Archibald Campbell with Chinese seed, and commercial gardens followed in the 1850s, worked by labour recruited from Nepal. Their descendants are the district's Gorkha population, and the connection matters: the Gorkhaland statehood movement is theirs, and the 2017 agitation closed the district for months and destroyed that year's second flush. Darjeeling became the first Indian product registered as a geographical indication, in 2004. Production has fallen for years, and 2017 accelerated both the loss of buyers and the shift of specialty demand across the border into Nepal.
Places in Darjeeling
Named places inside Darjeeling. The ones with a page of their own are links.