Dorje re-introduces Darjeeling tea to the Indian market with flavours for every season

An ambitious new project attempts to deliver Darjeeling’s tea, celebrating all its quirks and flavours, to your doorstep through the year

Despite the thunder, lightning and patchy phone connection, Sparsh Agarwal is undeterred. He bounces around his home at the Selim Hill tea estate in Darjeeling, recently renamed ‘Second Chance’ by his mother, in search of a better phone signal each time this interview is stalled by the storm. It is this cheery resilience that could give Darjeeling’s celebrated, but now struggling, tea estates a second chance to shine. But first, an experiment, which begins with an annual subscription plan that launches tomorrow, needs to go according to plan. “When Darjeeling tea is the pride of India, why are most of the 87 estates barely breaking even, some on the brink of collapse?” asks Sparsh, adding that the romance of this “champagne of teas” has drawn buyers from across the world, for two centuries.