Eat your heart out, Earl Grey. A tea grown amid the splendour of the Scottish Highlands will today be crowned the finest in the world.
Dalreoch Estate Smoked White tea, grown in Amulree, Perthshire, has won the Gold Award of the Salon du Thé in Paris, an achievement as impressive as it is improbable.
Fending off famous names from China, India and Sri Lanka, the Wee Tea Company triumphed only four years after the plantation put down roots. Its high-end product — available from Fortnum & Mason at £35 for 15g — has been a commercial proposition for only a year.
For Tam O’Braan, 45, founder of the Wee Tea Plantation, it is the vindication of a dream, one he celebrated yesterday with a cup of Smoked White in an Edinburgh hotel.
The award ceremony takes place this afternoon, but Mr O’Braan and his wife, Grace, are unable to attend because she is due to give birth to twin girls. Instead Jamie Russell, the estate’s “tea master”, or taster, will collect the prize.
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By the end of this year 13 tea gardens will have been established in Scotland, all owing some debt to Mr O’Braan. He said that Scotland was on the brink of an agricultural revolution.
“If you were to say this is on a par with the foundation of the whisky industry, people would say you were unhinged,” he said.
“But, to be clear, what we are doing here is on a par with the foundation of the whisky industry.”
Known to locals as “Tetley Tam”, Mr O’Braan, from Northern Ireland, financed his plantation with money he raised from the sale of an international agronomy business he operated with Grace, 29.
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“We were doing re-afforestation work in the Amazon basin when we got an offer to buy the business. They offered three times what we had valued it at,” he said.
His first sight of the estate at Amulree was on Google Earth. In 2011, with his wife, he decided to turn a struggling upland sheep farm into a place of pilgrimage in the billion-dollar world of tea. They began with three plants from China, convinced that Scotland had the climate and conditions to build a business. Their hunch seemed correct when they quickly propogated 2,000 cuttings.
Then came the snows of 2012. Mr O’Braan said: “It was the worst winter for 200 years. Every leaf fell off, and I thought, I am going to turn out to be the most stupid person since Salmon Fishing in the Yemen.”
The failure of the tea business had been unthinkable. “I would never have been able to face my wife’s family again — or my neighbours.”
Then on Valentine’s Day last year the plants produced shoots. “We knew right then that we were going to produce a Darjeeling-standard flavour,” Mr O’Braan said. “It wasn’t till the following year that we found the bravery to tell people what we were doing.”
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At Christmas, by mail order, the plantation was selling its tea at £2,300 a kilo, or £230 for 100g. He sold out, all of it going abroad, most to China, to feed the appetite of the burgeoning middle class. Although it can also be found at Fortnum & Mason in London.
Talk about coals to Newcastle.