Wild Harvested

Tag: 2025

  • Critique of Darjeeling Reason, or Why Reducing Darjeeling Black Teas to “Muscatel” Is a Recipe for Disaster

    Critique of Darjeeling Reason, or Why Reducing Darjeeling Black Teas to “Muscatel” Is a Recipe for Disaster

    We have all heard it at least once: that Darjeeling black teas, the second flushes, taste like muscatel. To some it may seem a trivial matter, but for me reading it for the umpteenth time is torture, a subtle form of violence, like being tied to a bed and forced to listen over and over again to a lullaby sung by that unbearably grating voice of Liam Gallagher. Muscatel has become not a descriptor but a credential, a badge meant to pre-empt further inquiry.

    Over the past decades, this obsession with muscatel has degenerated badly, taking on the shape of every late-capitalist fetish: ultra-categorization, linguistic anesthesia, the aesthetics of pseudo-scarcity, and the misappropriation of other people’s labor (where those who break their backs always earn next to nothing, in short). Premium harvests, super-premium, super rare, Imperial this or Royal that, Maharaja, special series, gold, silver… entering 80% of the online shops that sell Darjeeling is like being completely drunk, crashing your car through the window of a bar, and then asking where they’ve hidden the gas pump. It’s chaos wrapped in floral notes and, obviously, muscatel.

    While the price of what is arguably the most “muscatel-like” oolong on Earth, the Dongfang Meiren (Oriental Beauty), was skyrocketing in Taiwan, and countries like Japan were demanding more and more teas with this profile, various Thai and Vietnamese players were putting their own substitutes on the market, with results that were sometimes surprising and at other times depressing. The difference is that, in those teas, muscatel aroma became an icon of ambiguity, whereas in Darjeeling people rushed headlong into it with kamikaze enthusiasm, to the point that this single aromatic note became the identity card of the entire terroir. No narrative was needed: all that mattered was printing the estate name in huge letters, saying it tasted of muscatel, and to hell with everything else.

    Some time ago I had a discussion about this with two old friends at L.’s house, on one of those days when the air feels heavier, slower, saturated with humidity, the kind of day when you feel the urge to attack something immediately just to distract yourself from the terribly depressing climate trying to crush your mental health. L. is not a lover of Darjeeling teas, let’s be clear. She mostly drinks Tieguanyin, Yancha, and Dancong. Or rather, she had never really been interested in Darjeeling, had never felt the call to walk down the nave and reach the land of lightning. To her they were indecipherable; she simply didn’t feel like buying them, dismissing them as “all the same.” Brutal, but how can you blame her if you read “muscatel” everywhere? It’s as if there were a sort of olfactory socialism, an aromatic Marxism. At some point, their supposed crown jewel, the muscatel note, turned into a leveling policy, an ontological sponge through which no tea is allowed to stand out for its diversity. And the 200 appellations used in a schizophrenic way do nothing to help, further complicating a broth into which everything has now been thrown to please everyone. L. found them oppressively repetitive and excessively, self-consciously “colonial” in their communication. Who would spend €0.50-1+ per gram on teas you don’t even know where to begin distinguishing, drowned in lexical accumulation and burdened by a long struggle to recover from counterfeiting? To be clear, origin falsification happens everywhere tea is produced, but here the media, local ones included, have shown no restraint in piling on, placing a blood-drained territory under the spotlight with macabre, necrophiliac delight.

    But back to the point: the problem is not muscatel itself. Muscatel has the same innocence jazz once had before becoming the soundtrack of elevators and three quarters of Christmas movies. L. told me she had last tried a Darjeeling ten years ago. The experience reminded her of her first time returning home after university, to her stale bedroom that smelled of being shut in and of puberty, with the blinds left in exactly the same position and the same wallpaper, only half detached and yellowed.

    This is because only in recent years Darjeeling has begun to stop being a historical museum, a sarcophagus of the status quo, although resistance remains. Sellers still peddle stuff on the verge of turning to dust, shredded, insipid leaves, or teas dressed up with names that excite colonial nostalgics and crown enthusiasts. What I’ve never understood is this inability to distance oneself from the constant urge toward self-marginalization, and why Darjeeling has refused to stop playing a marginal role, the eternal wallflower at the dance, watching others on the floor while sitting on the chair farthest from the punch bowl, waiting for an appointment that will never come on its own.

    The real problem is the renunciation of conflict. Authentic Darjeeling does not taste only of fucking muscatel. Sure, it’s there too, especially in certain cultivars and in specific seasonal windows, but reducing everything to that means deliberately amputating the rest, making people believe that Darjeeling tea tastes like nothing else. In reality, the tea from these mountains is frenetic, conflictual, full of friction, to the point that you would never believe the same leaves, processed differently, could come from the same terroir, or even the same continent.

    To insist on muscatel as the defining criterion is to deny this productive volatility, to make Darjeeling safe, legible, and ultimately harmless.

    The term muscatel has become a sedative that Darjeeling has been carrying around for fifty years like a bag of diazepam shot straight into the arm, endlessly.

    This territory does not need to be Kyoto, where everything is ultra-described, every sign is endlessly verbose in its insistent multilingualism, where everything is clear to the point of exasperation. Darjeeling should instead show its character, like a Calcutta market at five in the morning, or a pub brawl on any Friday night in Birmingham: disordered, real, and above all done with pretending that this land begins in the White Drawing Room, with all those useless appellations.

    There is an existential need to change the narrative around these teas, so that they can be described uniquely, as one would a singular work of art. We need to detox from neutral descriptions and lexical ambiguities. There is no need to re-propose a worn-out variation of the same symphony. Continuing to scrape the violin over the word “muscatel” is nothing but a preemptive retreat, a laziness that domesticates the masses. Excessive categorization has forced Darjeeling into the need to correspond to a genre, and as such it must “respond” and “fit,” rather than signify.

    Moreover, the systematic exclusion of autumn teas from market discourse looks more like an intention than an oversight. Autumn is less photogenic; muscatel aromas are often muted by a desire to experiment, to create more ambiguous leaves that offer a complex, divisive, at times eccentric aromatic stratification, shaped by different growing conditions.

    In this case, science ends up confirming what experience had already suggested. The famous muscatel aroma is the result of complex interactions, pedological, climatic, agronomic, altimetric, cultivar-related, and the relationships between plants and insects. This aroma appears almost as a direct consequence of the plant’s defense strategies against herbivorous insects, particularly thrips (Scirtothrips dorsalis) and jassids (Empoasca flavescens), whose activity increases during the second flush. The lesions caused by their mouthparts, rasping-sucking in thrips, piercing-sucking in jassids, activate inducible defense responses that lead to the production and release of secondary metabolites. In general, these metabolites play crucial ecological roles: they may act as toxins, feeding deterrents, reducers of plant tissue digestibility, or chemical signals that attract the natural enemies of herbivores. This principle, widespread throughout the plant kingdom, is particularly evident in tea plants. In the specific case of Darjeeling, herbivory stress induces strong up-regulation of genes involved in the biosynthesis of volatile aromatic molecules such as linalool, geraniol, nerolidol and their oxides, as well as key enzymes like lipases, alcohol dehydrogenase and glycosidases. Many of these compounds derive from precursors stored as disaccharide glycosides (β-primeverosides) which, under conditions of cellular integrity, remain separated from β-primeverosidases; membrane rupture caused by insects (and later amplified during processing) allows hydrolysis of these precursors and the release of free aromatic molecules. Among them are terpenoid compounds such as 2,6-dimethyl-3,7-octadiene-2,6-diol and 3,7-dimethyl-1,5,7-octatrien-3-ol, which specifically contribute to muscatel perception. A similar mechanism occurs in Taiwan with Empoasca onukii (Jacobiasca formosana).

    Darjeeling thus represents an emblematic case of convergence between ecology and taste, where muscatel is only one expression of an extremely complex system of interdependencies, also modulated by cultivar, altitude, agronomic management, and seasonality. But what happens when there are climatic imbalances, when gardens are located at very different altitudes, when insect density decreases? These increasingly common phenomena lead to teas that are radically different and inherently unpredictable from year to year. So why not accept this and build a new narrative structure?

    This is made extremely evident by scientific analyses, which highlight how the interaction of the factors listed above allows spring and autumn harvests to accumulate higher levels of metabolites, playing a crucial role in shaping Darjeeling’s aromatic and gustatory profile. Equally important, metabolomic analyses show clearly distinct profiles between flushes (amino acids, sugars, polyphenols, organic acids), demonstrating that spring and autumn can yield high metabolite accumulation and thus cups of great finesse, complexity, and internal tension, which should prompt a reconsideration of autumn teas not as secondary expressions, but as integral to the identity of Darjeeling itself.

    Choosing diversity, accepting that Darjeeling implies teas that are almost impossible to assimilate into any single category, means recognizing its very beauty, a beauty as refusal of assimilation, a beauty as measure, a beauty as resistance of an unnormalized remainder. Continuing to say that Darjeeling teas taste only of muscatel is like building a library filled with a hundred scientific studies, adding a generous amount of humanistic literature, Adorno, Camus, Scruton, Heidegger, Dostoevsky, and then setting it on fire.

    Changing the narrative means reintroducing risk. It means accepting experimentation in tea processing, occasionally producing batches that are hard to sell, leaves no one has ever heard of. Until a few years ago I myself was completely ignorant of what this land has to offer. Then I discovered Darjeeling teas from non-Chinese cultivars, roasted, smoked, or with every imaginable degree of oxidation, leaves with a huigan capable of overshadowing many Chinese teas; notes of mango and green cardamom, of apricot and at the same time wax on an antique piece of furniture, of moss and buttercream and Damask rose, or freshly pressed olives alongside jasmine accords. These are aromas that seem utterly incompatible in any other context, yet here they find shelter, like the eccentricities of the most diverse people taking refuge from urban rain under the same bus stop.

    Reorienting the narrative therefore means striving to describe each lot as one would an unrepeatable painting, just out of the studio and still smelling of oil-paint solvent. It means abandoning the illusory idea that quality coincides with clarity, aromatic clarity this time, not descriptive, because the most disparate and useless filo-colonial appellations will never restore lost authenticity, nor the uniqueness that teas from this terroir so desperately need to reclaim.

    Bibliography:

    Cho, Jeong-Yong & Mizutani, Masaharu & Shimizu, Bun-ichi & Kinoshita, Tomomi & Ogura, Miharu & Tokoro, Kazuhiko & Lin, Mu-Lien & Sakata, Kanzo. (2007). Chemical Profiling and Gene Expression Profiling during the Manufacturing Process of Taiwan Oolong Tea “Oriental Beauty”. Bioscience, biotechnology, and biochemistry. 71. 1476-86. 10.1271/bbb.60708.

    De D,  Hazra A, Das S. & Ray S.. (2025). Metabolomic insights into seasonal variations in Darjeeling orthodox tea: implications for quality, flavor, and nutritional profile. Journal of Food Science and Technology -Mysore-. 62. 10.1007/s13197-025-06310-2.

    De D, Sarkar S, Chhetri H, Chatterjee J, Sinha N, Das S, Sarkar A, Ray S (2024) Impact of meteorological and processing factors on metabolite composition of Darjeeling tea. J Anal Sci Tech 15(1):1–19.

    G, Bornali & Borchetia, Sangeeta & Bhorali, Priyadarshini & Agarwala, Niraj & Bhuyan, Lakshi & Rahman, A & Sakata, K & Mizutani, Masaharu & Shimizu, Bun-ichi & Gurusubramanian, Guruswami & Ravindranath, R & Kalita, Mohan & Hazarika, Mridul & Das, Sudripta. (2012). Understanding Darjeeling tea flavour on a molecular basis. Plant molecular biology. 78. 577-97. 10.1007/s11103-012-9887-0.

    Liu, Huifan & Li, Sufen & Xiao, Gengsheng & Wang, Qin. (2021). Formation of volatiles in response to tea green leafhopper (Empoasca onukii Matsuda) herbivory in tea plants: a multi-omics study. Plant Cell Reports. 40. 10.1007/s00299-021-02674-9.

    Sakata K, Mizutani M, Ahn YO, Shimizu B (2005) Floral aroma of Oolong tea are results of stress-responded reactions in tea leaves during the tea processing. In: 2005 international symposium on innovation in tea science and sustainable development in tea industry, 11–15 Nov 2005, organized by Tea research institute, Chinese academy of agricultural sciences, China tea science society and Unilever (China) Ltd., Hangzhou, China, pp 607–617.

    Wang L, Di T, Peng J, Li Y, Li N, Hao X, Ding C, Huang J, Zeng J, Yang Y, Wang X (2022) Comparative metabolomic analysis reveals the involvement of catechins in adaptation mechanism to cold stress in tea plant (Camellia sinensis Var. sinensis). Env Exp Bot 201:104978.

  • Why Are We Still Pretending Darjeeling Doesn’t Matter? – Seven Essence Darjeeling Ouroboros 2025

    Why Are We Still Pretending Darjeeling Doesn’t Matter? – Seven Essence Darjeeling Ouroboros 2025

    There are several reasons why I sometimes disappear and stop writing. A loss of imagination, a lack of interesting teas, and other times it’s simply my own bad habits sabotaging every functioning neuron like a broker gambling with other people’s money. And then there are a couple of reasons no one would care about anyway.

    But through all of this, I never stop reading.

    Still, I never seem to read enough about Darjeeling, about what happens up there, about its teas.

    I’ve always been a fanatic of the outcast and a chronic sentimentalist when it comes to shadowy corners, yet I can’t quite explain how, after twenty years of transformation, twenty years since Darjeeling was a caricature of itself, a withered tea ground into particles so fine they resembled the jaundiced, depressing version of the world’s most famous nose white powder. But now that this terroir is producing something extraordinary, even radical, it remains buried under a silence so thick it’s hard not to suspect that plenty of people prefer it that way.

    I mean, at this point Darjeeling has become like one of those old guitar shops where you walk in thinking you’ll just take a quick look and end up realizing that every instrument in the room has more personality than you do.
    And now they’ve even taken to crafting a flawless Yabukita, without kidnapping any Japanese makers or resorting to those “minor cultural seizures” the British used to call foreign policy when they royally screwed things up with China.

    Some time ago I met an art dealer who spent his days among some of humanity’s most astonishing paintings, only to return to an apartment with exposed meters, peeling plaster, cracks running across the walls like badly healed scars, and rugs riddled with cigarette burns. It was a hole carved out in the middle of urban chaos, the kind of place he’d only been able to afford back when interest rates were frozen. But to him, it was home. His emotional bunker. The private stage for his domestic follies.

    Ouroboros, this Yabukita first flush, is more or less the same thing for me. A reset button, the kind you press only when you’ve officially run out of patience.

    The aroma of the wet leaves recalls the soft, dim sensuality that must have permeated the ridotti of nineteenth-century Venice, where the creaking parquet served as an unintentional soundtrack to the backstage vocal warm-ups, and the scent of stage makeup sold to actors and singers mingled with the smell of sex and the dusty, threadbare drapes.

    It’s a tea processed like an oolong, a futurist tea built on juxtapositions and clashes, where notes of moss, damask rose, and face powder emerge as if a performer had just walked past you, brushing against your shoulder, not by accident but with deliberate slowness. Then mango, verbena, polished wood, and tuberose shift in tangled succession.

    As the sip moves forward, the intensity rises like a cab driver who refuses to acknowledge the existence of brakes; the mango grows richer with floral shades of geranium and violet, leaving a film of sugary sweetness on the palate and an obstinately long aromatic persistence.

    It’s a tea that grabs you by the collar and drags you right back to the exact point where you stopped feeling alive, but with a new perspective.

  • On How Hard It Is to Make a Good Black Tea – Sipping Viet Sun’s Lào Cai Deep Forest Black Spring 2025

    On How Hard It Is to Make a Good Black Tea – Sipping Viet Sun’s Lào Cai Deep Forest Black Spring 2025

    I sometimes think we take far too much for granted just how complicated it is to make a truly good tea, especially a good black tea.
    It’s treated as a Pavlovian reflex, a gesture made without thought, like pouring yourself another glass of prosecco when the guests’ conversation has already descended into collective complaint.

    We grow used to the idea of that same black tea we’ve known since childhood, the one we dip into hot water, pressing it against the bottom of the cup with a spoon as though drowning an enemy soldier, then lifting it out in an act of sheer mercy, waiting for answers that will never come.
    But how difficult is it, really, to make a tea that isn’t just another instrument of urban survival, like the burnt acid coffee of a NOLA diner where Truman Capote used to sleep off his drunk?

    Crafting an excellent black tea can be a perilous act, a poorly calculated risk, a climatic roulette.
    The best terroirs, in Yunnan, Vietnam, and Thailand, where the best Dianhong and wild black teas are born, are surreal, high-mountain subtropical zones with humidity often above 80% and violent diurnal temperature shifts.
    Many varieties from these regions, particularly the wild non-sinensis sinensis types, bear large, waxy leaves with thicker cell walls requiring greater mechanical force to rupture.
    And in cold, damp environments such as Lào Cai, leaf plasticity itself changes with temperature, creating irregular breaks that result in uneven oxidation.

    During withering and oxidation, intracellular water regulates enzymatic kinetics and oxygen diffusion; therefore, the microstructure of the leaf, guided by the degree of mechanical rolling and the residual moisture content, controls the access of O₂ to phenolic substrates. In large, thick-cuticle leaves, diffusion is limited, and mechanical rolling, by potentially breaking cells unevenly, can create micro-anoxic zones that produce grassy notes alongside over-oxidized regions responsible for bitter flavors.

    To make matters worse, these varieties exhibit a polyphenol oxidase activity significantly higher than that of sinensis sinensis cultivars, sometimes two to three times greater.
    This causes a much faster initial rate of oxidation and a greater release of heat, since these reactions are strongly exothermic.
    The result is a local rise in temperature within the leaf pile and extreme sensitivity to even the slightest thermal or oxygen fluctuations.
    A gradient of merely ±5 °C between surface and core can produce differences of 20–30% in the local oxidation rate, turning the process into a blind sprint toward excess.

    The pronounced diurnal temperature range triggers metabolic oscillations, leading to unstable enzymatic activity. Add to that the high humidity and the coincidence of the rainy season during harvest and processing, and the withering can drag on for hours and hours. Moreover, even the final natural drying can prove impossible and storage can turn into a logistical nightmare.
    All this leads to the constant risk of unwanted chromatic heterogeneity, partial over-oxidation, and distorted aromatic profiles, dominated by earthy and metallic tones, mouthfeel stripped of viscosity, and a finish that is absent, unpleasantly vegetal-oxidized, laced with the taste of missed opportunity and lost money.

    And yet, this Lào Cai Deep Forest 2025 by Viet Sun tells another story.
    Its wet leaves smell of a kind of wildness that would even coax a smile from Eduardo Kohn, of forest berries, amber, and guava.
    The olfactory profile deepens through the corroded cortex of a nostalgic old Tory: leather and forgotten colonial furniture, oak aged Pedro Ximénez, and the memory of a wilted rose.

    On the palate, it is soft, seductive, with a sugarcane sweetness and flavors of wild berries, dried flowers, and dehydrated cherry.
    It’s a difficult tea, one whose making requires traversing a desert of problems, an act of resistance against mechanization itself.
    But perhaps that is the price to pay for something potentially extraordinary.

    Kerouac once wrote that “problems are the general definition of the things in which God exists.”
    And here, God is probably caked with mud, smokes Saigon Red, and occasionally takes refuge in the hands of those who still believe in difficulty.

  • After the Metaphors – Viet Sun Cao Bồ Tall Trees Spring 2025

    After the Metaphors – Viet Sun Cao Bồ Tall Trees Spring 2025

    Usually, I would write about a place, a land, the wind disturbing the fragile balance of the hats of farmers bent by time and sciatica. I would use rhetorical tightrope acts that might seem almost contrived to some, or romantic and evocative to others.
    But this time I won’t do any of that, no recycled sensations, no stories about the battles in the Tây Côn Lĩnh mountains or about how this tea recalls that Eastern peace we like to import in small doses into our European afternoons, that peace found in watching Maggie Cheung walk under the rain while time slows down, when everyone holds their breath, diaphragm tensed, as absolutely nothing happens. Things that usually grant every tea a kind of added grandeur, a metropolitan dignity sweetened with a touch of neo-rural nostalgia.

    I’m not John O’Hara, and I don’t think people care to see every banal gesture described as a moral battlefield.
    So, this is a sheng. We’ve more or less all arrived there. And if I stopped here, I’d already be more honest than most of contemporary gastronomic documentary.

    But I believe this is one of those few Pu’er teas that doesn’t need me, or my words, or anyone else’s, to be understood. Roland Barthes saw in photography two fundamental aesthetic elements: the studium, the set of information one needs to know, and the punctum, the element that wounds, that seizes attention and couldn’t care less about the rest, about its translation into prose; it just arrives, contracted like a beast.

    It’s in its wet leaves, tremendously fruity and earthy at once, in that quarrel between magnolia, orchid, dandelion root, and Tellicherry pepper that the punctum arises. Barthes would say it’s in that absurd moment of unconditional pleasure that meaning breaks and truth seeps through, like a development flaw on a film roll.

    This ancient tall trees tea it’s a bomb wrapped in silk drapes, almost nervously delicate and at the same time powerful. It’s a sip of terroir served at a hundred degrees; it has everything that remains when you strip away the narrative.
    The texture is medium-soft; it tastes of pepper and wildflowers, white grapes, juniper, it tastes like that childhood photo with the grain too visible, the one you wish you had but that someone is now romanticizing somewhere on Netflix.

    The qi leaves you with a strange calm, almost clinical. The huigan is excellent; the bitterness is low, the astringency absent. The persistence is long, the sip seems to linger there, clinging to the squamous epithelium of your throat like a gentle remorse.

  • Dark Alleys, Bright Lies. Seven Essence Spring 2025 Darjeeling Petrichor

    Dark Alleys, Bright Lies. Seven Essence Spring 2025 Darjeeling Petrichor

    You never thought you’d find yourself at this hour of the morning in a place like this, and you wish you could appear to yourself less out of place than you actually are. You got there after immense vestibular struggles, tearing your jacket at the shoulder that had christened the walls of the whole 3rd Avenue, walls that were essential for you to keep an upright stance, while thinking about what it would be like to sit with your nose pressed against the condensation on the window, as outside the city swarmed in the intricate anthill of the metropolis’s underground.

    The hours slip away like scraps of time in the incessant rain, the night overcomes the inertia of time, and in that instant two o’clock turns implacably into five. The smell of water on asphalt enters through the door, filling your lungs. Within those four walls, where people seem intent on parading the abandonment of beauty as an ideal, human matter appears left in its larval, suffering state. And yet you decide, finally, to chase the storm. You leave that refuge of castoffs with cautious agility, pushing past the wreckage of bodies. The merciless daylight has not yet pierced you, but you sense that, if you dare to lift your gaze, you would discover the kind of sky Buñuel would have loved to film: bare, raw, condemning.

    The scent of petrichor comes as a diagnosis, a primordial odor of drowned cities and funerals. You fancy yourself a walk-on in Mastroianni’s La Dolce Vita, except there is no Anita Ekberg to redeem you, only empty taxis, memories soured by undigested alcohol, no vintage Italian cars, only graffiti, puddles shimmering metallic green, and a man clutching a handrail like Christ in Grünewald’s Crucifixion.

    And this Seven Essence tea, a 2025 Darjeeling first flush, is a confession of hidden memory, an echo from your compromised hippocampus able to grant grace even to one of these formless nights. It recalls the mineral scent of rock, buildings washed by a midsummer tropical rain, the dark humid nights spent cradling a glass; it carries that note of cake and caramelized fruit reminiscent of your mother’s tarte tatin at six in the morning, when you returned home sheepishly, with many good intentions and little balance. In this situation, the P312 cultivar seems to proclaim with satisfaction that nature manages to create grand works without pomp or excess. In its tones of aged wood and oat hay, echoes of moss and jasmine rise, preparing you for a perfect sip. one of those that seem to set things right, becoming a medical prescription for your attempt at redemption.

    This tea is a window onto the beyond, a buttery tincture, sweet and herbaceous, the liquefaction of a Salgado photograph with its exasperated structure. The sip is lushly viscous, the sweetness on the finish borders on obsessive, its complexity remarkable, and the persistence so strong that it makes you forget your last dinner in a seedy diner. But now that note of petrichor offers a way out of the city you had once chosen as the stage for your aspirations, a bandage on the broken promise of art that was meant to illuminate mankind, but which to your eyes now seems reduced to rancid ketchup and congealed mayonnaise.

  • The Design of Ephemeral Grace – Seven Essence 2025 Spring Quiescence

    The Design of Ephemeral Grace – Seven Essence 2025 Spring Quiescence

    Quiescence is the child of temptation, a tea that crashes in like Dean Moriarty’s wild, unhinged laughter, a tea that halts time, that fills empty spaces with the substance of life.
    It’s a spring harvest from cultivar B157, one of those rare works that appear once every four springs, refusing to exist in reflections, in mirrors, in repetition.

    The wet leaves smell of frangipani and vanilla, laced with the almost milky notes typical of Taiwanese oolongs. It feels like it fell from a Liberty canvas, dried in the dawn sun of Los Angeles, back when the light was still golden and the air almost liquid.

    It’s a hymn to creative impulse, to those destined to vanish, leaving behind only a trace,  like perfume on a pillow, or a copy of Les Fleurs du mal forgotten on a veneered nightstand, underlined, underlined everywhere.

    The sip is soft, pliant, sweet. It leaves a creamy, floral, almost cosmetic film on the tongue. You can sense the intent, the effort to craft an exceptional tea, every sharp edge softened like a minimalist organic vase. Its aromatic texture feels woven through an analytical, obsessive, surgical search for sensation.

    Sweet notes surface, mango custard, whipped cream, a whisper of osmanthus water. It’s the ultrasound of a happy childhood memory, evaporating into something denser, more designed.
    It lingers in the mouth, clinging to the palate, with a hauntingly familiar aftertaste of strawberry cream.

    There’s a quiet sense of luxury in all of this.
    It’s like stepping into a room decorated only in pale gold and French velvet, with bottles of Champagne scattered across the floor,  where nothing is left to chance, and even the dust participates in the choreography.

    It’s a layered, intentional experience. A reminder that 2025 is a truly remarkable year for Darjeeling.

  • First Flush, Final Breath: Drinking the Last of the Muses. Seven Essence 2025 FF Darjeeling Muse

    First Flush, Final Breath: Drinking the Last of the Muses. Seven Essence 2025 FF Darjeeling Muse

    At a time when humanity still seemed willing to believe in something beyond the mere surface of things, the Muses sat upon Mount Parnassus. It was an age when people were aware that art was something more than just a string of provocations with fluctuating budgets, something more than what you can now sort “from most to least expensive”. The nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne guided the hands of painters; their voices stirred the blood that fed the cante jondo, urged demons to move T-Bone Walker’s left hand just a little more, whispered the six sonatas for violin and harpsichord into the ear of Vienna’s young prodigy. Today, I fear they no longer sit anywhere. Presumably locked away in some post-industrial loft in Milan, gagged with tape labeled “reconstructed identity” or some other bullshit straight out of the Damien Hirst playbook.

    Calliope, the one who once conversed with Cesare Pavese, has now ceded her place to seventeen seasons of some televised sobfest. Euterpe, on the other hand, is in despair, seeing a world that once resonated with the sublime tones of Giuditta Pasta now wander aimlessly with earbuds in, listening to some immersive composting sound experience, something for those who believe that rhythm is a new form of urban mysticism. Suffering is no longer catharsis, but mere reportage. Tragedy has become a type of therapy. Art is now a vehicle for delivering yet another saccharine confession that nobody asked for. The Muses have not been imprisoned by the market, but by contemporary philosophy itself, which has always denied their necessity.

    And yet, now and then, one of them escapes. And when that happens, a Christone Ingram appears. Or a Jordan Casteel. Or a Jacopo Cardillo. Someone who doesn’t need to prove that their kind of expression deserves a higher, transcendent status, because people don’t need to convince themselves that it does. They simply know it. Instinctively. No massively inflated price tag is required to protect their importance, because no price would ever be enough.

    Where once we invoked the austere beauty of Dreyer, or the sacred silence of Tarkovsky, today we exalt centrifugal narratives that refuse to come to any kind of conclusion, as if the unfinished were somehow more “true” than the completed. Perhaps I too am an asymptomatic carrier of this condition. I have a draft of a book sitting untouched in the upper left corner of my desktop for six months. I sometimes drink more than I should. I let Rory Gallagher depress me far too much. And I find myself sensing emotion in a throwaway work by Twombly.

    Before the whisper of a Muse, before hearing the chords of Erato’s lyre move the soul, before Melpomene offers her sword to face the tragic, it now feels almost more honest to linger in the unformed, a sort of beta version of the present that will, one day, receive its necessary update. We live in an age that collects fragments. Isolated sentences. Reels. Reels of reels. Everything must appear as something short enough to scroll past, yet long enough to suggest continuation, even if that continuation never comes. And this, I believe, applies to everything in our lives.

    And I believe it also applies to tea. Including the rare sparks of the extraordinary. It’s entirely possible that one of the Muses escaped into the Darjeeling region, slipping away for one spring from her confinement to the ruins of mythology, leaving strands of her robe in what this first flush has become today: the blooming of precocious talent, something you feel a desperate urge to consume, for fear that it may wither overnight.

    Muse is a sublime tea, the kind I come across only once every three or four years, because evidently nature does not wish to give more than that. It’s a tea whose wet leaves smell of bison grass, soft French nougat, myrtle leaf, and mulberry gelato. At first, it seems accommodating, then it leaves the coasts of Occitania and dives into deeper waves of sweetness: guava, golden kiwi, and frangipani, lined with vegetal chords of cactus, then aloe, like in an art deco perfumery in Silver Lake. In the end, everything contracts into something foreign, citrusy. Pomelo. Sharp. Precise. Almost hostile.

    In the mouth, it’s soft, intensely sweet, but anything but commonplace. The flavors point to fig, vine leaf, traces of herb butter, something vaguely liqueur-like, maybe green acorn distillate, and then birch sap. It’s not a taste. It’s an image. Then it veers. Completely, into mulberry and grape.

    For anyone who believes Indian teas lack Qi, they need to try this. The sensation is stunning, abrupt like a flood of adrenaline rushing through the vena cava, like that chill running down your spine when something truly significant happens. Like all great teas, it lingers. It stays with you for hours, like a text message at 3 a.m. you wish you’d never read. You can push it through ten infusions, fifteen, but the flavor never leaves your mucosae. Muse persists, like nails tapping softly on a taut drumskin, quieter and quieter until nothing is heard anymore and the noise of the street comes through the window, and yet you know that something is still resonating in that absurd chaos.