Seven Essence Darjeeling Masquerade

I believe there are few people on this earth for whom I have ever felt even a modicum of envy, and I do not say this out of vanity nor from some absurd, ultraterrene awareness. I’m simply indifferent to the allure that possession exerts on people, the resonance of an echo of absence, the trace of a denied desire. Yet Bubble and Abhijeet have a rare, transcendent empathy when it comes to tea, a quality that is either innate or remains scarcely graspable, one that probably I don’t even have. Their autumn collection attests, indisputably, to their status as the Vaughan brothers of the Darjeeling terroir and to the perception that selecting leaves is a virtuous act, a testament to aesthetic discernment.

The election of the proper material is not a mere sorting process; rather, within it dwells that lyricism, that aphonic language in which what resides is lifted from its ordinary form, unfolding into a dizzying array of aromas and scents where time contracts and expands with a diaphragmatic cadence. To select leaves is an invocation of the sublime, a re-creation of the universal tension between order and chaos, wherein the structural opposition of what is utilitarian and what lies beyond utility is drawn and maintained open, rendering tea not merely a beverage but a vehicle of meanings.

Masquerade is a Darjeeling oolong produced from the AV2 cultivar, a tea with a dense liquor, a chromatic snapshot vibrating between ancient gold and dusty amber. The leaves exude the fragrance of rose and jasmine, of olive oil and fruit tart. The infusion is sweet, soft and persistent, with hints of pear, pistachio and dried apricot. It is a sip of freshness, capable of rejuvenating even those weary nights, illuminated by the flashing lights of police cruisers deployed in one of those torrid, sleepless nights.

Notes of chlorophyll, subtly vegetal, along with hints of olive leaf and mango, evoke an introspective road movie, laden with trembling shooting of hands brushing against corn stalks and bodies staggering in the sultriness, a spiral of rural unrest and youthful rage, of adolescent fights in the badlands, where typically nothing was too dear but everything cost too much.