Decanter World Wine AwardsRiedel to develop range of tea glasses
- Wednesday 11 July 2012
LaKyrsiew tea garden, Meghalaya, NE India
Lalani & Co was formed in 2010 by brothers Nadeem and Jameel Lalani. It works only with artisan and family-run tea gardens including the renowned Big Island Tea Garden in Hawaii, the Indian boutique garden LaKyrsiew, and leading Darjeeling tea garden Makaibari.
It supplies ultra-exclusive teas, like the First Flush ‘Wonder’ from Godpaldhara Garden in Darjeeling and the Summer Reserve from LaKyrsiew, to a number of high-end UK restaurants, mostly in London. These include Gauthier Soho, Hibiscus, Zuma, Nobu, Bibendum, Tamarind, Trishna, Brown’s Hotel and the Stafford.
The specialist – loose-leaf – tea market in the UK is small, representing around 5% of the £650m UK market.
The Lalanis are convinced the British – who drink 165m cups of tea per day – have an appetite for the rarefied teas that they import. At the top end they can cost up to £6,500 per kilo, while most are a good deal more affordable.
Lalani & Co is now working with Riedel to develop a range of tea glasses. The project is in its early stages, but they have hit on Riedel’s O range of stemless glasses – specifically the stemless Riesling Grand Cru and the Pinot Noir – as the most suitable.
Riedel UK managing director Steve McGraw told Decanter.com, ‘Interestingly, we could have chosen to use stemmed glasses for the teas, and the effect would have been the same, however, we thought that consumers might find it slightly too “different” to drink tea from a stemmed wine glass.
‘We selected the O range as it’s perhaps less challenging to use, being similar in some respects to holding a traditional Chinese tea cup.’
Riedel and Lalani will be holding a tasting workshop in September to pinpoint more precisely the shape and size of glass that will work best with different teas. ‘It will be very interesting to see what develops as we research the subject further,’ McGraw added.
To the connoisseur, tea has something in common with wine, in that terroir and provenance are of the utmost importance, and aroma and mouthfeel, tannin and acid quality are prized by tasters. Many tea gardens – as plantations are called - have been run by the same families for generations.
The Lalanis are concentrating on presenting tea as a refreshing and benign palate-cleanser, ideal for stimulating the appetite.
‘The tannic acid in tea activates the stomach acids,’ Nadeem Lalani told Decanter.com. ‘So the new place we have decided to put it is before the meal, as opposed to the traditional British way of drinking it at breakfast or in the afternoon.’
Have your say!
Theo Clement
October 01 13:10
A very interesting article which may be announcing a future evolution in our hot beverage consumption. Tea is already the 2nd most sought drink on the planet, after water. But in the UK we still seem to think of it as a "cuppa" for dunking biscuits or in the most sophisticated way Twinings' range from earl grey to Darjeeling's finest. There is so much more to Tea then that, as mentioned in the article, tea tasting is an passionate art in India that can only be compared to Wine tasting. Each type varies from estate, to style, to stalk, to leaf and then again to the different types (Orthodox, CTC, Green tea).
I'm a caffeine addict and can't even dream of starting my day without a coffee, but having had my eyes opened to this new world of smooth, subtle and yet antagonist tastes I do believe I'm converting.
As mentioned in the last paragraph of the article if you look into the meliorative affects it has on us humans you'll soon find out that they are far greater then coffee and that green tea boosts metabolism rates and energy, while drinking a cup before a meal helps initiate digestive acids, burning fats quicker, to the same effects of a grape fruit starter.
I think Tea is coming back in force and we shall soon enter a new era of tea parties.
I am interested however what kind and where originates a tea sold and bought at up to "£6,500 per kilo"?