Good tea: Brisk in cup and on film
By Julie Brown-Micko

America is a coffee drinking nation, from our “venti” Starbucks to the humble Folgers perking in the pot. But tea, particularly high-end leaf, is moving out of coffee’s shadow and into the light of popular consumption. Thanks to All in This Tea, Les Blank and Gina Leibrecht’s documentary, we can discover what seasoned tea drinkers like David Lee Hoffman know: this ain’t your mama’s Lipton and it’s good. Really good.

In this tightly constructed, briskly moving film, we get to tag along with American tea importer David Lee Hoffman as he takes the path less traveled (literally), searching for high-quality, handcrafted organic teas in China. Hoffman is an amiable, eccentric guide whose passion for tea is infectious. Only someone driven, stubborn or nuts—or all three—would struggle as Hoffman does with the Chinese bureaucracy to gain direct access to farmers and argue for free trade. In addition to wrangling with the government, Hoffman pushes for organic tea with no chemical fertilizers or pesticides, to the chagrin of the businessmen and their mass-produced teas.

With Hoffman as our travel companion and guru and Blank the master behind the camera, we get to see stunningly beautiful, remote parts of China, explore the history of the plant, learn of its use as medicine and currency and, above all, vicariously experience the pleasure of the tea. Other experts fill in with more information about the beverage, but always with an enthusiasm that keeps the film from sliding into a boring history lesson.

The intriguing Hoffman carries the film and ties everything together. Hippy, wanderer, businessman, missionary, aficionado, dreamer, and geek—you can’t help but root for him. He does have a healthy dose of ego that can irritate, as when he arrogantly proclaims that only organic foods sustain us (plenty of people are happily sustained by Rainbow or Cub). But more often his hubris amuses, as when he earnestly tries to encourage the Chinese businessmen to tell the farmers to use earthworms, helplessly trying to find the Chinese word for “worm poop.”

In the end, we find that good tea is a lot like good wine: dependent on the land, the weather, and the art of the vintner (or tea maker). As author James Norwood Pratt wittily comments, “What we want from tea is a drink to write poetry and make love by.” All in This Tea will have you putting down your wine glass and reaching for a small porcelain cup, instead.
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