DO not misunderstand when I say I have been inhaling from a tin and now feel uplifted. I have not been taking snuff. Rather, I have been smelling the aroma of Lapsang Souchong tea. The tin is from Fortnum’s and the smell is a bit like, oh, the afterwhiff of an expensive cigar, or the aroma of peat-smoked whisky or a smouldering bonfire in the woods. What the smell actually derives from is Chinese red pine over which the tea leaves have dried, slowly, in the Wuyi mountains of Fujian Province.
Once, you could buy this in Twinings, formerly one of the great tea emporiums. I’ll be heading to its outpost on Fleet Street shortly to snap up any remaining stock. Because, in one of those terrible misjudgments that business schools may well be brooding over in decades to come, Twinings has sold the pass and has replaced real and authentic Lapsang Souchong with something called Distinctively Smoky.
