• Home
  • Saicho Darjeeling
  • A bottle of Saicho Sparkling Tea Darjeeling on a clean white background. The glass bottle contains a pale golden-yellow liquid and features a purple label with white text, topped with a decorative purple neck label showing a peacock illustration.
  • A bottle of Saicho Darjeeling Sparkling Tea, featuring a pale yellow liquid inside a clear glass bottle with a blue label and a decorative cranes pattern on the neck seal, set against a solid off-white background.
  • Saicho Darjeeling Sparkling Tea served in a wine glass
Saicho

Saicho Darjeeling

$20
$20
Sale Sold out
Shipping calculated at checkout.
Size: 200 mL

Darjeeling, in first flush.

Saicho holds tea to the standard of wine. Founded by Natalie Chiu and Charlie Winkworth-Smith — food scientists, husband and wife — and named for the monk who first carried tea from China to Japan, it exists to give tea its rightful place at the table: the same glass, the same considered hand. That conviction is why they entered the house.

Darjeeling is the structure of the wall. A single estate in the foothills of the Indian Himalayas, harvested in the brief spring window when the leaf is at its most tender — first flush, the vintage the year is judged by. Cold-brewed a full day in English spring water and finished with a fine carbonation, it holds the muscatel that earned Darjeeling its old nickname, the champagne of teas — stone fruit, grape and white flowers moving over a woody tannin to a clean, persistent close.

Darjeeling has always been the tea drinker's wine — single-origin, vintage-driven, sensitive to season and slope. The wall's most wine-like leaf, and the bottle for occasion: a toast, a celebration, the first pour of the evening.

We do not score. We read. The Reading is how the house locates this bottle — four axes, written on the four petals of the mark.

The Reading™

NOSE    muscatel

ARC    climbing

WEIGHT    tannic

STAY    dry, long

One to four petals, quiet to pronounced. A Reading is a location, not a grade.

Read in — the handblown Stem Zero Masterglass. The bowl gathers the aroma and lifts it to the nose before the first sip.

Serve — well chilled. 

Nose — Muscatel. Stone fruit and grape rise first, white flowers behind them — the aromatics that named it the champagne of teas.

Arc — Climbing. It builds as it travels, gathering rather than settling — the most deliberate ascent on the wall.

Weight — Tannic. A woody, structured grip over the fruit; the leaf was tender, the cup is not.

Stay — Dry, long. Clean and persistent — the finish of a true first flush, holding its line well past the sip.

The Table — The toast. The celebration. The first pour of the evening — and the leaf that stands up to the meal that follows.
A bottle of Saicho Sparkling Tea Darjeeling on a clean white background. The glass bottle contains a pale golden-yellow liquid and features a purple label with white text, topped with a decorative purple neck label showing a peacock illustration.
Saicho Darjeeling
$20
$20