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 bar�??the Italian equivalent of a coffee house�??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 it�??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.

Ah Assam. Although I have never physically been there, I fell in love with this corner of north-eastern India back when I was a teenager, a frighteningly long time ago. I read about it in the books of Emilio Salgari�??a master of adventure literature most of whose work, sadly, has yet to be translated into English�??where a group of Malaysian, Indian and Portuguese pirates defies bloodthirsty natives, powerful Brahmins and the evil British Empire to conquer a small kingdom.

The magic of the country shines in its tea. Assam has little to do with serene meditation. It�??s a passionate, powerful cup that speaks of sleek tigers, lush plants and hollow baobabs that hide the entrance to secret temples. It is Picasso�??s Cubist period, a scream of colors, textures and shapes, to the Nilgiri�??s Canaletto �??elegant, restrained and sublimely devoid of emotion.

Of course, I am biased. I like strong teas and am incredibly partial to malty flavors. I like malty tea, malty ale (Duchy Original�??s Winter Ale, in particular) and malty whisky. I wonder if an excessive use of Ovaltine as a child may be to blame?

Still, the Assam I tried today�??Whittard�??s House Blend�??wasn�??t particularly malty, as far as Assams go. I brewed according to instructions, using three teaspoons for four minutes for a six-cup teapot. The leaves had a strong scent that didn�??t emerge with as much clarity in the liquor. The cup was a rich dark amber color with an ever so slightly caramelly nose. In the mouth, it had good body with some sweetness, the right astringency but just a hint of malt. The finish was pleasantly long, and I found it supported milk very well.

Then I went back and brewed it my way�??using a full four teaspoons for a six-cup pot and steeping for five minutes�??and liked it better. But I think my tastebuds are biased.

Perhaps it�??s because I don�??t travel enough. Or maybe I am just a very sad, boring person. Either way, I have decided to start an armchair tour of the tea world. It gives me an opportunity to sample different tastes and�??more importantly�??put my feet up for the five or ten minutes it takes to make and drink the tea. Anyway, I drew a lovely map of all the countries I am hoping to �??visit�?? and stuck a pin to find a starting point.

It turned out to be India. So I went off and sourced three or four Indian teas�??mostly from Special Teas, because they sell a very affordable $1 sample size for most of their stuff�??and today, I got started with Nilgiri.

Nilgiri is a small district in the state of Tamil Nadu, in Southern India. It sits on a hilly, rainy plateau, so the tea produced here is high-grown at altitudes of up to 6,500 feet. I am far less familiar with Nilgiri than with other Indian teas, so I was very curious to give it a shot. I usually prefer to buy small farm teas, but I was constrained in my choice by the need to get a sample size, so I ended up plumping for a single-estate Thiashola garden�??which is as far from a small business as it gets. Set at an altitude of 6,500 feet, the estate spans some 464 acres and belongs to Hindustan Level Limited, the Indian subsidiary of Lipton tea owners Unilever. Still, it is one of the oldest estates in the area, and one of the first to move toward organic production.

The tea I got, which is not from their organic range, is a TGFOP, which stands for Tippy Golden Flowery Orange Pekoe. This is a grade in orthodox tea manufacturing that indicates a tea made with the bud and first two leaves of the Camellia plant which has plenty of golden leaf buds�??also known as tips.

As per Special Teas�?? instructions, I brewed a heaped teaspoon in 6 fl.oz. water at 100C (212F) for three minutes. The resulting liquor was delightful to look at�??a clear amber color with a delicately floral aroma. The taste, however, did little for me. Nothing to fault with the tea itself. It�??s simply that I like my Indians to be punch-my-tastebuds teas and this caressed them softly. It�??s a bit like being into Gerard Depardieu (which I am) or Pamela Anderson (which I am not) and being offered Orlando Bloom or Calista Flockhart. This cup was very delicate with barely-there vegetal notes and just a hint of the lemony flavor that Special Teas highlights in its description. It is undoubtedly very elegant and soft, although it has a slightly astringent finish. Despite what Special Teas say, I don�??t see how it could really bear milk and sugar without vanishing altogether. All in all, a cup for poised, refined types.

Why, oh, why didn�??t I study more chemistry at school. Truth be told, I just hated the subject, but some chemical knowledge would come in handy to answer a burning tea question.

The rec.food.drink.tea group has been debating whether reboiling water affects the taste of your tea, and how. Now, every tea book I know says that you should use freshly drawn water to make tea and reboiling it is a major no-no. But I have recently read Hervé This�?? book, Molecular Gastronomy : Exploring the Science of Flavor. This is France�??make that the world�??s�??leading expert in molecular gastronomy and, beakers in hand, he has proved that many culinary practices guaranteed to improve the flavor of food are little more than myth. His book set me thinking. What if some of the standard practices in tea-making were also a myth? What if you can happily reboil water?

A search on the Internet bore no fruit. Some sites suggest that reboiling water deprives it of oxygen, so the resulting tea tastes flat�??but others say that most of the oxygen goes with the first boiling and repeated boilings make little difference. Other sites say that reboiling water increases the concentration of mineral, which is not only detrimental to a good cuppa, but also to your health. But then again others maintain that, as you reboil water, minerals precipitate to the bottom of the kettle or pot and the resulting water will be purer. Now, this again could affect the taste of tea�??but how much? I know that the limestone build-up in my kettle is so much worse when I reboil water than when I don�??t, but I am not sure how that is going to affect flavor.

To try and solve the conundrum, I set up a little test, making tea with freshly drawn tap water and some Darjeeling GFOP. Then I reboiled the leftover water and made another tea�??also with Darjeeling GFOP, using the same spoon, colander, steeping times and type of cup. I tasted the two teas blind and found the one made with reboiled water had a marginally more pronounced flavor than the other one�??but then I might have given it a marginally longer steeping time without realising it. Other then that, I could tell no major difference.

I suspect that a single reboil isn�??t going to alter water�??s chemical composition so much to have a discernible impact on taste. But reboiling several times might. Since the question still teases my mind, I put finger to keyboard and asked the expert�??Hervé This himself. I am now hoping he will get back to me and shed some light on this once and for all.

UPDATE: I heard back from This, who was incredibly kind and replied quickly to my fairly out of the blue email. He says that there is no doubt that ions are very important to the taste of water. So if the concentration of these ions increases through multiple boiling, this could definitely affect the taste of said water�??and hence of tea. He wasn’t too sure about the impact of dissolved gases. Either way, he suggested running an experiment by filling three vessels�??two with water that has boiled once and one with water that has been repeatedly boiled�??and asking several people to identify the two identical ones. It’s an interesting one. I plan to set it up and report results.

Time to confess. I often drink commodity tea–from tea bags. It usually happens when I am hard at work and pushed for time. I either make myself some fast-brewing loose leaf greens, such as Sencha or Gyokuro, or I resort to teabags.

When this happens, I usually reach for Twinings Classics Teabags. But lately, I have been looking around for different stuff. And I have now found some tea bags which work rather well for me–Dilmah’s Watte range, a series of teas from Ceylon. I have become rather partial to Ran Watte, which is high-grown tea from the slopes of Nuwara Eliya. Dilmah touts it as the Champagne of teas–which is a rather abused description I have heard applied liberally to Darjeeling as well as high-grown Ceylon. I find it yields an elegant, smooth brew which is light at first impact but with a long finish.

It doesn’t rate up to properly made loose leaf tea–but it is instant drinking at its best.

Say tea and I�??ll think black. So ingrained is my prejudice that I forget the vast majority of the world drinks green tea. Which is why a message on Adagio�??s TeaChat forum took me aback yesterday. Posted by a green tea lover, it asked for suggestions to move into black tea. And I suddenly realized it never occurred to me anyone could ask this question. It just goes to show just how much my palate is influenced by my culture and place of origin.

Anyhow, it was fun to turn my prejudice on its head and start thinking�??if I had only drunk green and wanted to move into black, what would I have? My answer, like many other posters suggested in that thread, was to choose oolong. Oolong is a somewhat neglected tea�??Joe Simrany of Tea USA once told me that it is only drunk by 2 percent of the world�??s tea drinking population�??which I think is a shame. Most oolongs make fabulous drinking. The one I am drinking now, Whittard�??s Formosa Imperial Phoenix Oolong, is lovely, with light but round mouthfeel and a delicately sweet flavor. Oh, and I read somewhere that it helps fight aging.

But what�??s perhaps more interesting for someone wanting to move into black tea is that oolongs come in several degrees of oxidation. This means you can slowly adjust your green-geared tastebuds by going from a very lightly oxidized one�??closer to green tea�??to a highly oxidized one�??closer to black. Indeed, some of the more highly oxidized oolongs were developed specifically for the export market to satisfy black-tea-shaped Western palates like mine.

The concept obviously works just as well in the reverse�??you can drink oolong as a way to move from black to green. So did I follow my own advice and drink it when I made my first forays in the world of greens? Nope. Soft landings are not for me�??I belong to the sink or swim school. I jumped straight into Gunpowder (the green tea, rather than the explosive type). And you know what, it worked for me because it suddenly opened my eyes to a whole new gamut of tastes that I wanted to explore. Maybe I should have suggested to that green tea lover at TeaChat to take the plunge and start drinking Irish Breakfast.

My mother took a sip of the Darjeeling and Oolong blend I made for her last Christmas and mulled over it a little.

�??It�??s very good,�?� she said.

I braced myself for the �??but�?� I knew would inevitably follow.

�??But not as good as that Keemun,�?� she said.

Ah, that Keemun. A Roi du Keemun, to be precise, and royalty it was indeed. A deep red, round, sweet brew with a satisfying floral aroma.

We bought together from Mariage Frerès when we took a trip to Paris six years ago. Since then, it has been the benchmark for every other tea my mother has. And no one ever really measures up. After years of drinking only Darjeeling, Assam and Ceylon, my attempts to broaden her horizons turned my mother into a bit of a Keemun convert, but even other Keemuns we tried fell short of the Mariage Frerès standard.

She can�??t really point out what made that tea so special, except saying that whenever she had a cup she wanted to have more. If it were a book, critics would call this compulsive need for more the Keemun�??s reserve of vitality�??it remains alive and attractive to you because you want to go back to it and explore its every nuance. My mother simply calls it that tea with a dreamy note in her voice.

Good daughter that I am, I going to buy her some Roi du Keemun from Mariage Frerès�?? online shop for her birthday. It won�??t be identical to that one of course. Much like wine, tea changes every year, depending on the weather, the conditions of the soil and the human vagaries of plucking and processing. But I suspect that even if it were identical, it still wouldn�??t rate up to that Keemun. Because, over the years, that tea has acquired the delicious taste of good memories.

I am usually rather wary of flowery reviews that tell me a tea has hints of banana or underripe tomato. The truth is these descriptions hugely depend on the reviewer’s frame of gustatory reference. And because they are so subjective and hardly ever give me an indication on whether I would actually like to drink that tea.

I remember once reading a wine tasting report which defined a particular wine as tasting of wilted flowers and soaked prunes. Well, I haven’t got a clue what wilted flowers taste of–let alone whether I’d like to find traces of it in my glass. Sometimes, these descriptors trigger mental pictures that can be outright offputting. I remember once an olive oil tasting where the producer was terribly keen to tell us that his oil had apricot notes. Suddenly I had this vision of drizzling apricot juice all over my salad and the thought was hardly appealing.

But then one such flowery description happened on me. I was drinking a cup of Sencha when it hit me. Its scent evoked strong childhood memories of a sun-drenched hillside covered with wild irises. Now I can’t manage to shake it off. No matter how else I try to define it, Sencha for me tastes of wild irises in summer. So I now have a lot more understanding for flowery reviewers.

Clink, clonk, clank. My son was playing with my tea caddies a few days ago when I thought I could perhaps expand his olfactive horizons by making him smell some tea. At the grand old age of 18 months he is still too young to drink the stuff, but sniffing it gave him great pleasure. I gave him a teabag of English Breakfast and rubbed it under his nose. He smelled and emitted a loud, satisfied Ahhh.

Encouraged, I decided to move on to more serious stuff. Ditching the tea bags, I got out a caddy full of Pai Mu Tan leaves. Before I could even think of scooping out some for him to smell, he plunged his hand into the leaves, grabbed a fistful of them and shoved them into his mouth. Prising his jaw open and taking out half munched leaves one by one was an arduous task and I am sure he ended up eating a good three or four of them. So much for keeping his caffeine intake down…

Bruce Richardson, the founder of Elmwood Inn Fine Teas and one of my tea heroes, has a very interesting piece on the January number of Fresh Cup about Britain’s declining passion for tea (disclosure: I too have an article in January’s Fresh Cup).

I agree with his rather sad assessment that the British increasingly associate tea with older generations or as a medicine for an upset tummy. And it is lamentable but also true that the average London high street has more American-style coffee houses and Italian-style espresso bars than tea houses.

However, London is not Britain–in most villages you’ll find not a whiff of Starbucks, although you may find some nice cream teas organised by the local church. And tea remains very much a part of everyday British life. Perhaps because instant coffee on the fly is never very good, most offices have tea stations–that’s what they are called, I kid you not–with a kettle, a fridge (for milk) and bagfuls of PG Tips or, if you are lucky, Twinings.

Anecdotal evidence leads me to believe that specialty teas are on the rise. And green and herbal teas are especially popular with young people for their much-touted health benefits. Granted, the British tea industry needs to work hard to shake off its somewhat old-fashioned image before it is too late. But there is yet hope for tea in Britain.