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Lewis Perin

writes:

> Lew, curiously pulling on a funny looking cord:
> > Karsten - are you there?
>
> Yes Lew, I´m just so much focused on gong-fueing these days, found a
> secret stash of Oolongs in the cellar, shllllllrppppp, oh my ...
> Well yes clonals, when it comes to Darjeelings I´m afraid I don´t
> enjoy them that much as I like those old chinese bushes.
> IMO tastewise the major problem with clonals is the lack of genetic
> diversity among those thousands of plants in (parts of) estates where
> those old (up to 150 years - game over) chinese bushes have been
> replaced by clonals - in Darjeeling mostly "Tukdah 78". Sorry for the
> bad comparison but to me drinking a clonal brew feels like going to a
> museum with 100s of copies of the same painting and not much else to
> see. However wonderful that painting might be, I´d always prefer
> variety. Additionally to me clonals smell and taste somewhat "hollow",
> everything is on the surface, on "display". Again that is not meant to
> turn anyone off.
> Of course there are "exceptions", e.g. Castletons 2005 SF Muscatel cl
> (=clonal); that tea is just so damn expressive, bold and playful but
> then again it´s from the food synthesizer in the main deck cantine,
> sniff ...

Since I'm out of my depth in talking tea agronomy, I wrote to
S.M. Changoiwala, the Darjeeling and Dooars tea planter whom longtime
RFDT readers will remember.

While Karsten never said the 2005 Castleton was the only "exceptional"
clonal tea, SMC thinks there are lots of good clonal teas in
Darjeeling:

All the Clonal bushes are not inferior to Chinary bushes, from the
quality angle. Take our wonder tea- it comes from clonal bushes.

By the way, he warns against assuming that a Darjeeling tea is grown
from seed just because you don't see "CL" in its name:

All Darjeeling gardens do not mark separately " clonal " for their
clonal teas.

According to SMC, to focus on Tukdah 78 would be concentrate more on
the past than the present:

Tukdah is the Darjeeling garden which was our TRA ( Tea Reserch
staiton's) first "Clonal proving station". So naturally first of the
few darjeeling clones have come out of bush selection at Tukdah or
from gardens( like Banneckburn etc belonging to the same english
company - later on it was sold to warren india and a few years back
has changed hands to Lohias) Tukdah 78 is the first released clone
from the bush selections in Tukdah. Earlier released clones
cuttings/ plants sell cheaper than the late released clones in
general. Some gardens still may be using T 78. \we planted T78 at
Soongachhi [in Dooars] and response was very good , for orthodox
manufacture.

T 78 leaf mixesd with some other clones / mixed with chinary leaf
gives better quality than the individual clonal leaf or chinary leaf,
but not always.

Tukdah 78 is an assam type of clone and is a yield clone. Furthe now
after so many years, this clone has started dying at high elevation
and since last 5 yeaars or so this clone is not being propagated any
more in darjeeling gardens.

Moving beyond the Tukdah 78 question, SMC notes that the quality of
the leaf has to do with a lot more than the genealogy of the bush:

Genetically all the tea bushes of clones like Tukdah 78 as
mentioned, should give the same quality, but other factors likes
soil, pruning operations etc etc affect the quality, and there is
day to day varion in quality and bush to bush variation in quality
from the same section.

And there are lots of clonal lines in play now:

And again the selected clone it self may be a chinary bush/or asssam
or hybrid. Clone selection , if done for flavor, may be one single
chinary tea bush selected from say a lac [100,000 - Lew] of chinary
tea bushes and this one selected tea bush after so many trials is
found to give best flavor and that why this particular bush was
selected and treated as mother Bush.

Clonal selection is done for quality or quantity or both or for any
particular characterastic and for particular areas/ regions.

Darjeeling has good number of clones like AV2, Phoobsering etc,
having different characterastics .

Clonal bushes are not more resistant- due to the basic fact that
they are always shallow rooters in comparision to seeds.

Again some clones are better rooters than other clones which are
better shooters , so the cutting of the better shooter is grafted on
top of the cutting of better rooter, so that we have a clone with
both better roots and shoots.

All the Darjeeling clones are not early shooters and all are not
high yielders. some are quality clones and poor yielders and some
are quantity clones with less quality and some have both but with
average quantity and quality.

In the same section in Darjeeling , most of the gardens would have
more than one clone. So that the taste is same - as suggested by the
person concerned- [this would be Zdenek - Lew] can not be true.

And SMC warns against assuming that a Darjeeling invoice is
necessarily all from China-seed bushes even if it's definitely
non-clonal;

Even chinary leaf mixed with some assam leaf [here he means bushes
of Assam heritage rather than leaf harvested in Assam] gives bettr
quality than china alone at times.

One thought just occurred to me (and for this, SMC bears no
responsibility.) In Phoenix oolongs, it's considered a big plus to be
able to buy from a small lot of tea from a single tree, i.e.,
genetically identical leaf. So I doubt that there's anything inherent
in cloning that imposes a "hollow", surface-only taste and aroma.

Note that I'm not endorsing planting vast swaths of land with one
strain, or for that matter, a small number of genetic lines.

/Lew
---
Lew Perin /
http://www.panix.com/~perin/babelcarp.html