I travel around Europe a lot and tend to have tea shops stops in as many cities as I possibly can. I shop at Fortnum & Mason in London, Sans & Sans in Barcelona, and the incomparable Mariage Frères in Paris, which is perhaps the best of them all. In Milan, my favorite place is the tiny and unassuming (but expensive) Drogheria Soana, which I prefer to the flashier and even more expensive Peck.

Italy is a strange country, in that very few people drink tea and the average cup you get in a barâ??the Italian equivalent of a coffee houseâ??is dreadful. But this desert has a couple of extraordinary oases, where you can buy or have some excellent tea. One of them is Soana, a family business founded in 1947, which has a large selection of established gardens plus the odd novelty, such as tea from Laos.

On my last visit there, a couple of weeks ago, I bought some Assam Mokalbari. I drunk it today to compare it with the Assam blend I had yesterday. Despite a common Assam-iness, it made for a very different experience.

I steeped two teaspoons in a three-cup teapot of boiling water for four minutes. This cup was darker than the blend, the color sugar has when itâ??s about to burn. It had a hint of a scent, a barely there vegetal maltiness with a whiff of something sweet. It had a good but not overpowering body. Sweet at first impact, it developed a malty complexity as it travelled through the mouth, with a touch of astringency to temper any excess. It was perhaps subtler than I expected, but a neat cup nonetheless. I like to think of it as a Cézanne.