Summer Muscatel Black

Muscatel is Darjeeling's most famous word, and its least explainable. Somewhere in the meeting of summer sun, high altitude and the old Chinary leaf — helped, the planters say, by the small insects that graze the summer shoots — the cup takes on the unmistakable taste of muscat grape.

It cannot be manufactured and it cannot be blended in; a garden either produces it in a given summer or it does not. Giddapahar's muscatel is plucked through June and July from bushes over a century old, rolled whole and oxidised to a deep amber. This is the tea that made these hills famous.