The famous tea note, muscatel, starts with an insect bite.
You've probably seen the word muscatel on the label of a second flush tea from Darjeeling and thought it was just a regional name.
It actually describes a note brought out by an insect biting the tea plant in summer, the same natural phenomenon behind Taiwanese bug-bitten oolongs like Oriental Beauty.
While Taiwan built its most celebrated oolongs on the bite, Darjeeling spent more than a century crediting its terroir.
Contents
What is muscatel?
Muscatel is the flavour note most closely tied to the second flush from Darjeeling. Serious drinkers pay a premium for it, and nobody outside Darjeeling can reliably reproduce it.
The word comes from the muscat grape, one of the oldest grape families still grown, and from the sweet muscatel wine made with it. In tea it has come to mean a muscat-like fruitiness, grapey and floral, sometimes with a musky spice underneath. Tea writers often say this flavour is hard to pin down.
One of our tea masters, Sonam, who makes our Himalayan Beauty Oolong, once described a true muscatel like this: the dry leaf smells of burnt sugar and caramel, the steeped leaf gives off a dry, rosy perfume, and in the mouth there's a toasted, buttery note with a honeyed finish that lingers.
So where does it really come from?
For more than a century the explanation was terroir: the altitude, the mist, and the particular soil of the eastern Himalaya. That was a sensible assumption, and terroir genuinely matters here, because the tea really does taste of this place.
It just can't account for muscatel. Terroir stays the same from one year to the next, and muscatel doesn't. It only turns up in summer, and even then not every summer, from the same bushes in the same garden.
The cause turned out to be a third party: a tiny insect feeding on the leaf.
That insect is the tea leafhopper, known in Darjeeling as the tea jassid (Empoasca flavescens), a sap-sucking insect only about three millimetres long, which works alongside even smaller insects called thrips. Sonam knows these insects well: he spent two years at India's Tea Research Association studying how thrips affect different tea cultivars.
Leafhoppers arrive with the warmth of early summer, which is exactly when the second flush is picked. An adult lives for only about two weeks, but new generations keep hatching through the warm months. While they're around, they pierce the young tea leaves and buds and drink the sap.
What happens inside the leaf?
A tea plant can't move away from an insect, but it isn't defenceless. When something starts feeding on its leaves, it can tell it's being attacked, and it changes its own chemistry in response, making aromatic compounds called terpenes.
These compounds do two jobs. Some make the leaves less appealing, so the insects move on. Others work as a call for help. Researchers studying tea fields have found that the scent of leaves fed on by leafhoppers draws in tiny parasitic wasps, which lay their own eggs inside the leafhoppers' eggs. Linalool, one of the compounds in that scent, is also one of the floral, sweet-smelling compounds we know from tea itself.
So the aroma we pay for began as the plant's alarm. It's the plant's own chemistry that you taste, and the insects themselves have nothing to do with the flavour, apart from setting it off. Withering, rolling, and the rest of the processing then develop those compounds further, into the honeyed, fruity character of a muscatel tea.
It's also why this kind of tea can't be made on demand. It needs a warm summer and a garden that hasn't been sprayed with pesticide, because pesticide keeps the insects away, and without them there's no muscatel.
Why did Taiwan get there first?
In Taiwan, the same natural phenomenon became an entire category of tea.
In the hills around Beipu and Emei in Hsinchu County, a close relative of Darjeeling's leafhopper, possibly even the same species under another name, feeds on the tea bushes in the same way. The story goes that a farmer's crop was ruined by insects, but he processed the leaves anyway. He sold them for double the usual price, and nobody believed him when he said what he'd been paid. The tea kept the nickname pengfeng cha, braggart's tea.
Taiwan saw the opportunity early and marketed it well. The tea became dongfang meiren, Oriental Beauty, and the bite became a selling point printed on the label.
Darjeeling went another way. Nobody there knew what caused the flavour, so the region built its reputation on muscatel as a taste, without the story of where it came from. That's understandable, since you can't market a cause you haven't found. By the time the link to the leafhopper was understood, muscatel had been the word for a century.
Is a summer oolong from Darjeeling the same as Oriental Beauty?
No, even when they're made the same way.
Although they share the same natural phenomenon for the flavour, what still separates them is the terroir we talked about earlier. Oriental Beauty grows low, at around 300 to 800 metres, in the warm hills between Taiwan's mountains and plains, mostly from a local cultivar called Qingxin Da Mao. In Darjeeling most gardens sit higher, many of them between about 900 and 2,000 metres, in a cooler climate, on different bushes.
For most of its history, the second flush from Darjeeling was made as black tea, with the muscatel carried inside a fully oxidised leaf. Today some makers also turn bitten summer leaf into oolong, using the same approach Taiwan uses for Oriental Beauty. Our Himalayan Beauty, for example, comes from AV2 bushes at around 1,700 metres. The insect starts the flavour, and then the place and the bush decide how it turns out, so terroir ends up shaping muscatel after all.
How can you taste it for yourself?
Earlier we said that the terroir stays the same while muscatel comes and goes with the season. You can taste that for yourself with two teas from the same hills.
Start with a first flush, the early spring harvest, picked before the leafhoppers arrive. It has a floral, crisp character, which also comes from how it's processed: it's usually withered hard, rolled lightly, and barely oxidised, so it pours pale gold. There's no muscatel here. It's light and bright, and some tea lovers wait all year for the fresh spring batch.
Then taste a second flush, picked in summer. It's fruitier, with a sweeter, fuller body. The fuller body comes mostly from processing and the more mature summer leaf. The muscatel, the fruitiness that sets it apart, comes from the insects that arrive in summer and bite the leaves.
Nature's Monopoly
True luxury in agricultural products cannot be manufactured on an assembly line or forced by a factory machine. All a grower can do is leave the garden unsprayed and pick at the right moment. When we drink it, we are celebrating a beautifully uncontrolled quirk of nature.
The tea in this article
Himalayan Beauty, a bug-bitten oolong from Darjeeling
Sources
- Tony Gebely, World of Tea (2012). Describing Muscatel, with James Norwood Pratt's definition and Sonam's description.
- Wikipedia. Muscatel (tea), on jassids, thrips, and the muscat-like character.
- Eric Scott, World of Tea. Oriental Beauty: bug-bitten teas, on how the plant responds to leafhoppers.
- Wang et al. (2023), Pest Management Science. Tea green leafhopper-induced synomone attracts the egg parasitoids, mymarids, to suppress the leafhopper.
- Your Article Library. Tea Green Fly (Empoasca flavescens): Distribution, Life Cycle and Control, on the adult lifespan.
- Wikipedia. Dongfang meiren, on Oriental Beauty, its cultivar, altitude, and production region.
- Happy Earth Tea (2013). Why is Darjeeling first flush so green in appearance?, on first and second flush processing.