TAKING tea with James Henderson Robe is not my usual bag-of-Tetley-dunked-in-a-stained-mug affair. Oh no. First, the fresh leaves (we’re drinking Oriental Beauty, since you ask, a summer harvest oolong tea from Taiwan, considered by many to be the world’s finest) are rinsed in a red clay teapot. The water is just off the boil (too hot, apparently, will cook the delicate leaves, making them bitter).
When he pours, we drink, daintily, from little glass cups. And the flavours? I’m getting ripe fruits, honey and sweet muscatel notes, combined with hints of warming spices and exotic woods.
The comparison with wine-tasting is a deliberate one. But we’ll get to that later. Because, for all the ritual, Robe is keen to make quality tea an accessible, affordable luxury for everyone. “Too many people make too much fuss about tea,” he insists. “I kind of see it. We put more effort into coffee these days and I feel we should do the same with tea. But basically, allow the boiled water to cool for a minute – that’s roughly all you need to do.”
The 33-year-old from Edinburgh should know his Iron Buddha from his dragon pearl jasmine tea. He has been drinking and sourcing the stuff for more than ten years and has, for the last eight months, been putting his money where his sophisticated palate is by launching Driftwood, an internet-based company selling fresh, loose-leaf teas from some of the most obscure corners of the world. “I find it a slightly strange and quite exciting career,” he says.
“I remember being fascinated as a child watching my great aunt pour tea. She was a very refined old lady who would blend her own teas in the kitchen. That was a real ceremony. She would use china cups – she had spent a lot of time in Hollywood, where her husband was a sound engineer – and although I didn’t drink tea as a child I was intrigued. I couldn’t understand why she did this. It had a real impact on me without me really thinking about it.”
A job in the music industry, followed by a marketing degree at university, exposed a young Robe to new horizons and the kind of people who appreciated fine food and wine. “I started dating a very wealthy girl whose family owned a winery in Spain, so I really got into wine-tastings and developed a palate there.
“In the end, I really don’t remember what possessed me to buy tea. It was probably pretension, to be perfectly honest. I realised I was just far better at picking out the flavours in tea than wine and I really enjoyed it. The tasting is exactly the same, looking at the microclimates where the tea is grown. This is high-mountain tea from Taiwan, so the tea bush is enveloped in mountain mist, which is what protects it and gives it this beautiful flavour.”
At the same time he discovered a talent for cooking, so instead of continuing in the music business he enrolled in catering school and became the Dutch ambassador’s private chef. As you do. But a dodgy knee (from a rugby tackle on the dancefloor at university) meant standing in the kitchen all day was off the menu and he moved again, this time into a job in the media.
All this time he was sourcing and buying teas in increasingly large quantities. So when he was made redundant, he left London behind and returned to Edinburgh, determined to get into the tea business. “There are, very loosely, six types of tea, from white tea to oolong and black tea. But within that there are thousands of varieties. The stuff that goes in teabags is quite literally the stuff that is swept off the floor after all the higher-quality stuff has been picked up.”
His discerning customers are “a surprising number of young people from London”, while 20 per cent of sales are in the US. But what he would really like is to see Driftwood in restaurants. “It’s really surprising,” he says. “You can go into a restaurant in Edinburgh and they can tell me the provenance of the leaves on your plate. And you look at their spirits menus and their coffees. But then they give you a bag of Twinings.”
He adds, hastily, that he is no tea snob – he’ll happily down a cup of Typhoo if offered – but his favoured accompaniment to a brew is not the traditional biscuit. “I think tea works very well with cake. It is also being used more as a base for cocktails,” he adds, “and in cooking, poaching fish and making syrups.”
And, he says, warming to his theme, it might surprise many to find that fresh, loose-leaf, quality tea is not much more expensive than a box of bog-standard bags – £3-£6 for 25g (30 cups of tea). “The business is growing at a great rate,” he says, “and I think a lot of that is because it’s a luxury item but it’s still affordable.”
Get the kettle on again then James.
{www.driftwoodtea.com.driftwoodtea.com.driftwoodtea.com}