Infused with Enthusiasm
The Napa Valley Register
By Jennifer Coverdale, Wednesday, August 20, 1997

Tea Merchant finds appreciative palates in wine country

David Lee Hoffman is forever on the search for the ultimate leaf. He'll climb trees for the choicest and even wait at collection depots to rescue others from being baled in with low grades.

And all for the sake of whiling away the hours at a later date - with the finest pot of camel's breath or golden monkey misting at his side.

For 25 years, Lagunitas -based Silk Road Teas has gone from here to China to seek out the perfect organic teas for his palate and for sale.

What he looks for, the Oakland - born importer said, is a vitality that is missing from supermarket teas, which one lifelong pure -leaf tea drinker likened to "store sweepings".

It isn't that the flavor of major brand blends is bad, Hoffman explained, but that "it's like a monotone." In contrast, a given pure leaf tea can taste 10 different ways, depending on how it's steeped and imbibed.

All but one of the teas sold at Silk Road are handpicked from wild tea plants or tea gardens, including roughly 80 acres that he's invested in China.

Silk Road doesn't blend - that means no jasmines or Earl Grays are sold - and no perfumes, flavorings, colors, oils, or preservatives are added. The teas are "as pure as the moment they were picked," according to Hoffman.

A cottage industry, Silk Road deals mainly in wholesale, but this years it's become one of the monst talked-about vendors at the Napa Valley Farmer's Market in St. Helena.

And not surprisingly, given the sophisticated tastes in wine country and the parallels readily drawn between winemaking and tea processing, both of which are considered to be art forms.

Customers at the Friday morning market are even adapting their wine vocabulary to tea, according to the 53-year old merchant of the leaf.

"These people know how to taste, they get it," Hoffman added. "You don't have to tell them this is a good-tasting tea, and they smell it too, andthis is a very important part of the tea, the aroma." Just like grapes, tea leaves all come from one plant (Camellia sinensis), but in a myriad of varietals, in fact in far more than grapes, Hoffman said. "You literally have thousands of distinct varietals," he added.

Like wines, some teas also need to sit on the shelf for 10 years before they're ready - and all varieties can be enjoyed without expertise - drinkers need only to find a tea that stimulates their taste buds and imagination.

"It's a matter of state of mind," said Hoffman, who also vends at the farmer's market in San Rafael and has a mail-order catalog. To appreciate pure teas, he added, drinkers need only to give them a moment all their own.

"The main thing is to stop whatever you're doing, shut down all the mental chatter, put all your problems aside - just for a minute," he said, then take a pinch of leaves, put it in a pot, add water, filter and sip.

However, savoring the taste is perhaps where the parallels end. Tea farms after all would hardly work in the Napa Valley: it's just too dry.

But the drawbacks of growing tea in California are not the reason Hoffman has gone so far for the tropical evergreen leaf.

Tea after all does grow in the United States, in North Carolina and Hawaii, and about 30 other countries. However, nowhere is making tea so refined as in China, where the art dates back to ancient times.

The flavor of tea is shaped by everything from the timing of the harvest- the window for picking high grades is often just a day or two - to the manner in which the leaves are picked. Some must be removed with fingernails, others, with a curved knife.

Just s important to taste is how the leaves are processed. Dragon well, a nutty tasting green tea, requires 10 distinct hand movements during processing to get a consisitent taste, color, and odor, according to Hoffman.

Hoffman's selection of teas for Silk Road ranges from the rare to the exotic in categories of white, green, oolong, black, and pu-erh (pronounced pooh-air), with countless varietals in between.

He calls pu-erh, "the tea for the coffee drinker" or more colorfully "the '53 GMC truck of teas: hearty, strong, earthy, with lots of mileage per cup." This tea is also one of the easiest to brew. Silk Road teas are made from tea leaves, buds, or a combination of the two, and some also incorporate parts of the woody stems. Many are cultivated, though Hoffman also sells wild tea, picked from virgin forests where the plants grown into tress, some as old as 1700 years.

Hoffman began his passion in the mid 1960s, soon after taking what was to be a three-month leave from his studies in physics and engineering at San Jose State University to travel abroad.

Three months became ten years, during which time he worked his way through Europe, Africa, and Asia, teaching English, washing dishes, even making sound recordings (he produced three albums of Tibetan folk music).

Every day and everywhere he went, he drank tea, whether it was in Morroccan tea stalls, the yak hair tents of Tibetan nomads or tea shops in Hong Kong - in no time he was hooked.

"I started noticing there were great differences in the taste of tea and that's when I began searching out consistently high grade tea and I found it was very difficult," he said.

When Hoffman returned to the Bay Area in 1973, it was even tougher. While working as a textile conservator, he began looking for decent green in the Chinatowns of San Francisco and Vancouver, British Columbia.

But there was a lack of consistency from one batch to another, and "being the passionate detective I am," Hoffman added, he returned to China to select the finest grades he could find for sale at home.

Along with running Silk Road, Hoffman writes articles for Tea Magazine and was invited two years ago to the National Tea Tasting, an honor that allowed him to taste 250 of the finest green teas in China. He's also contracted with Ten Speed Press to develop a book with the working title, "The Great Tea Book", and works with the prestigious Tea Research Institute and the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences to implement sustainable organic tea farming in China.

Today, farmers there follow the "San-wu: the three no's of farming - no chemical fertilizer, no pesticides, no pollution - but they rarely return organic matter to the soil, which is where the need for sustainable farming comes in.

Soil is not only important for yield; it is the leading factor in affecting taste. (Though Hoffman said he's tasted the best teas of his drinking life in China, most of the teas there lack oomph, he said, because of overworked, undernourished soil.)

Today, pure-leaf tea can be found almost anywhere in China, and uet it is rarely imported to the United States. In fact, it almost never leaves the country, Hoffman said, or even the village where it is grown.

That's because, until very recently, the family that grew it always consumed it because it wasn't viewed as worthy of sale; in fact, poor farmers used to apologize to Hoffman because they couldn't afford pesticides.

But that's changing - as is the American taste for tea in general. Worldwide, tea is second only to water in popular drinks, and every year, studies emerge to suggest new medicinal benefits.

Oolong goes great with Tai food, sencha with seafood and dragon's beard with chocolate. Dragon's well is good for cooling the body off and some oolongs work well iced because they're naturally fruity. Among the importer's all time favorites, jade spring fresh off the misty mountains and longjing or dragon well grown west of Hangzhou City - known for it's jade green color and sweet fragrance.

Tea's heritage is one of the most romantic - born of the clipper ships that traveled the high seas and the Silk Road, where camels carried packs of tea on caravan routes.

Even the names of tea sound like poetry, such as three cups fragrance and drum mountain white cloud. A few are just downright provocative, such as camel's breath, which develops an espresso flavor.

Though Hoffman now prefers not to add anything to his tea, for those who do, he recommends brewing in spices, such as cardamom, cinnamon, mace, and whole peppercorns, before adding milk and sugar.

But mostly, he recommends that they just enjoy the moment of a cup of fine tea. And listen. Even the most delicate teas, he said, can be exciting to those with patience.

Tasting unadorned tea is like "listening to a symphony" according to Hoffman.

To really get to know a tea, he said, drinkers should suck in a lot of air as they're sipping, then let it sit on their tongue for a while before they swallow.

"There's an initial taste of the tea, there's the taste as it's going to the back of the mouth and going down, there's the aftertaste that may go on for 15 -20 minutes," he said. " A good oolong will do that do you."

Then there's another taste that happens in the gut. "I drink pu-erh, not for the taste, but for the way it makes me feel afterwards," he said. "It's a very settling tea."

His most expensive tea is almost $2000 a pound, a high grade competition green tea, but he's witnessed a pound of tea being auctioned off in China for more than $20,000 - even brought back a sample given to him by the grower and served it covertly to the public.

"I didn't tell the public what it was," he said. "I just served it with my other teas. I was curious about people's reaction to this tea. Some people just stopped dead in their tracks; some people tasted and walked on."

Though it was a very good tea, Hoffman said he tries to talk people out of buying high-priced teas until they've defined their tastes. 'The fact is you don't need to spend a lot of money for good tea," he said.

"And actually some of my best-tasting teas are the least expensive," he added including spring spear tip and three cups fragrance - $6 for a quarter-pound bag which makes 180 cups.

Many of his teas cost $100-$200 a pound, but the price per cup amounts to no more than 30 cents, he said. "You pay less for the finest tea than you would for an inexpensive wine or a can of Coca-cola." The reason, he added, is that pure leaf tea goes so far.

"A $100 pound of tea costs less per cup than the cheapest tea bags in the supermarket. Why? Because with tea bags, you get one cup and have to throw the bag out. With quality tea, you can get six to eight, even 10, from the same batch of leaf."

Hoffman said Silk Road, founded in 1992, has never advertised; marketing has always been word-of-mouth. "We prefer to let the teas sell themselves," he explained.

He added that his motivation for growing the business isn't so much to make money, although the business must make a profit, but to try to change the planet in a simple way.

"Ten thousand years ago the world' population is what New York City's is today," he said. "We have less than 5 percent of our virgin forests left on the planet, species of life disappear every day, cancer and infectious diseases run rampant. So I ask you, Isn't this the perfect time for a cup of tea and to reflect on that?"

Hoffman hopes to bring fellow lovers of the leaf to the backcountry of China for tours of organic tea farms, during which time visitors would stay in government guest houses. For more information about Silk Road, call 415-488-9017.