A touching story about Portuguese tea.
Nina Gruntkowski is the only tea producer at the north of Portugal, mainland, who produces green tea and oolong. She is a tea artisan knowing what she wants and steadily moving in the direction of her dream despite of all the challenges. When I met her at the tea symposium in Czech Republic, I was very impressed with her tea story and a very brave path she chose 15 years ago having enough stamina not to give up and even more – inspire the others with her dream.
So I suggested her making an interview to share her story for the others while we were sharing tea in a beautiful wild garden of Tomas.
Now, when I have all these pages of script I made I don’t want to miss a single detail about her as everything seems to matter in her story. So brew a cup of tea and get ready to meet a very interesting tea person and her story written with heart.
Invisible tea path
“I was born in Germany and all my childhood I drank tea with friends and loved tea shopping. Tea was important part of my life – I never drank coffee. It accompanied me through all my university studies and later on when I worked as a journalist.
I don’t know why but when travelling I always ended up with tea plantations. My first travel outside Europe was to Australia and without having planned I found myself in the Daintree rainforest and there was a tea plantation. Then when I was in 2004 in Mozambique for a journalistic travel, for research I was at the boarder on Malawi where they were having their first harvest after the civil war and recovering tea production in Northern Mozambique. I was a tea fan for almost my whole life, but I never imagined working with tea.
Portuguese vein and a dream job
I specialised in Africa and social anthropology and spoke Portuguese as I practiced capoeira in Germany with Brazilians. Because of capoeira, I traveled a lot and when I started to work as a journalist, I started to work mainly in Portuguese speaking countries so this is where Portuguese vein comes in. Journalism was my dream job and I had many interesting projects but I knew it was not for all of my life. I knew that one day I would produce something. I worked on the radio doing a lot of on-air programs. I ended up living in Portugal because of my ex-husband who was Portuguese. I worked as a journalist a bit from there still for the German broadcast, watching out what else I could do.
Radio interview that changed everything
Once I had a radio interview with a tea specialist on the south of Switzerland – Peter Oppliger. He had a small tea plantation there – close to the Italian border. I almost destroyed the recording when he pronounced “camellia sinensis” and “camellia assamica”. It gave me such a flash that I started thinking: can it be that this plant could grow in Portugal as well? The thing is I was very attracted to camellia flower –we call the north of Portugal “the land of the camellia trees”. People of Asia come to visit to see the camellias. After the interview, I finally could ask the question that was bothering me all interview: Can camellia sinensis grow in Portugal?” And 2 minutes later I had a tea plant in my hand and I brought it to Portugal.
A word of spring that meant “yes”
I left the tea plant in the garden for one winter not doing anything. I said to myself: If it dies, the project will not start, if it thrives I will do it. When the spring came, new leaves that were out on the plant were telling me: “we should do something”. Therefore, I ordered 200 plants from Switzerland, made rows in the lawn, and filled it with the plants. Then I started studying what it means to produce tea and realized it was a long term project. 5 years the plant need to be in the ground until the first harvest. Even in Asia plantation starts to give full amount just after 10 years. Production is a complex thing. I was not aware of any of that but I was convinced I should do it. I started planting – the first two years only in our garden just to see how they develop, not for production but seeing if the climate is suitable or we were just lucky the first year. But the plants grew very nicely. At that time I enjoyed most Japanese teas and mainly Kukicha. So I went to my favorite tea shop in Cologne/Germany which belonged to a man who was starting to be my mentor by that time. I asked: “Could I contact Japanese producers.” He looked at me and laughed: “Nina what a stupid question you have!” The thing is for most of the teas here nobody can tell you the producer as it is a big industry. However, he had a new project with people from Frankfurt, my home town, who imported tea straight from the producers in Japan. He gave me their contact and wrote to them. They contacted Morimoto.
Morimoto
Some months later they came here and embraced my project. They loved my little plants and were so excited about it. They helped me with how to prone, how to evaluate if the growth is normal. When you see pictures, you see very beautiful tea plantations but when you plant new plants, you have to search for the tea plants in between the weeds. The feedback for me was important, you doubt when you see the disaster in your garden and compare to those beautiful pictures in the internet.
Portuguese tea habits
At the same time, while I was observing the plants I started distributing Japanese tea, making tea tastings to show people very good tea. Portuguese people are not a tea-drinking nation. When you go to the teashops, you may see very old tea. I realized that if I wanted to produce and sell tea I have to help people to get used to good quality tea so that they are not shocked by the price of a good tea. So I first started selling Japanese tea not through the shop but through organic shops, restaurants and hotels.
Tea and wine
I was connected to wine business through my ex-husband and I had access to all these places. I am tasting-addicted person and grew up with a grandfather who is a wine collector all his life. I had almost professional degustations. Tea was always for me about taste. Thanks to my husband, I entered the world of wine tastings. It was my best school to treat best wines. We both traveled a lot and brought teas from all over the world. I love degustations but I don’t like hang over. In my life tea grew more and more important to balance alcohol. Thanks to wine I can very quickly evaluate the taste. I know what I want. I am also a bit stubborn – I am convinced we should not copy tea from Asia. I am doing a lot of free style in my production – it is very artisanal with a lot of adaptation. My approach has always been connected to terroir and I would like to produce something that shows the character from north of Portugal. I am sure what I like and when I find it I know this is it. Every time I create a new category, I can repeat it as I can evaluate it and I think it is due to tasting experiences in my life and not comparing it with wonderful teas that exist.
Master vs colleague
I do not like the concept of master but prefer colleague. Accompanying smb and completely observing what the person is doing. I was lucky to observe processes of Morimotos. It was very beautiful but very different from what I do. They have super high tech and I will never be able to afford it. I always wanted to do more artisanal teas. In 2019 I travelled for 3 weeks in China with European tea growers association. We visited almost all tea production areas except Yunnan and I received mega introduction to Chinese teas. The same year I traveled to Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong and was able to import machines from Asia. In 2019 I made first portion of very artisanal green tea from 5-6 year old bushes. Within 4 years we planted 1 hectare with 12.000 plants. It was planned that in 2020 Morimotos would come but then Covid happened and nobody came. I was forced to do what I could do with all the knowledge I had sucked in before. Beautiful part of tea production is that I do the same things every day and at the end of the day I drink my teas and can evaluate them very well. Now I want to go and produce with colleagues as I have a lot of invitations to do it together. I am so much looking forward to it. You can always learn and this world of production techniques is so diverse. Now I feel that I really want it. I am super happy and I guess it was good that I did it right from the scratch.
3 supporting legs
Our small company has 3 legs that keep us going: distribution network, visitors and events on the farm and our own production which is rising in quantity and quality. This year we produced more quality teas, 120 kilos all together. We become more trained and can delegate things and team is more qualified, nobody is coming new, we have more or less the same tea. I have built up within 15 years a big distribution network not only in Portugal but all over Europe. Now people come and visit us from different countries: private customers or professionals buying from us or staying at workshops. We have grown in quantities and diversification of our products. As now our quantities are rising, we want to place it on the right spots like speciality tea shops, so that more and more tea people are able to get to know our teas.
A tea producer, not tea business for the sake of business
I am a tea producer. I don’t do tea business for the sake of business – I just love to produce tea. We do everything around it to make it happen. It is directly traded tea. I do it because I am a fan of tea. In mainland Portugal I am the only farmer. There is two other tea farms on the Azores Islands with alltogether 30 hectares. It used to be 300 hectares and 20- 30 companies there producing black tea and English style tea. We produce mainly green teas and oolong. And here it’s a completely different climate with distinct winters, a dormancy period. I really like such teas that in spring flush with bigger complexity of flavors than tea regions that are producing all year round.
We are the first producing in mainland Portugal but in the beginning of the 20th century there was a little plantation also in the north and there is historic records that this was a thriving project in terms of plants so that it was proven that the land is suitable for growing plants. But the owners went after two years back to Brazil and they never produced tea
I don’t want to be big
I think I don’t want to become big, because the way we are producing is not possible in big. We have one hectare, 12,000 plants. By the way, all plants we grew in Portugal. I tried twice to import plants from Japan. It is not forbidden but nobody wants to take responsibility, so I never managed. There are many camellia collectors in Portugal, which are collecting the flower camellias. I contacted one who was propagating lots of camellias. We did plants from cuttings, from specific plants and from different seed origins. In four or five years, we cleaned one hectare of land completely manually, not destroying the soil layers. Crazy work, when you have an abandoned vineyard. We have very diverse plant material from very diverse origins: 99.5% Camellia Sinensis, some Thalliensis, and also some Assamica plants just for showing they can grow in our climate.
I can’t see myself conducting a bigger team, which you would need for more quantity and produce cheaper. I think it is too demanding to conduct too many people in that sense. We are not in Asia, we do not have trained pluckers. It takes one whole harvest to train somebody just to pluck, and then production is another thing and so on.
Diversity
I have a dream of diversification in our tea range. I’m more and more convinced that the most natural ways is the best, because we can compare in our field the plants which grow rather in forest conditions and the ones which grow in plantation conditions, because our farm is super diverse in the geography and biodiversity. All our fertilizers are produced by ourselves with the material from the farm. So we do compost, mulching and biodynamic treatments since the beginning. The permaculture formation gave me even more insight in the possibility of symbiosis between plants. The tea plant naturally grows in the second floor of subtropical forest, so it is underneath the bigger trees. So I immediately started dreaming of planting tea trees in a forest-like condition. And therefore we planted in February tea plants with hundreds of other trees in mixture. Now it’s not a forest – one can just see the sticks marking the trees and weeds. But plants will grow. Diversity in terroir and plant material means also that the ripening of the leaves is different, so you have a wider window for harvesting. If you plant one variety, one hectare in the same physical condition, it’s all ready at the same time. But if you have the different varieties, then you have it all spread out and you can have more time for playing around. And I hope to go even further in diversification. Every plant from a seed is different, and in the forest where I planted seed plants from our own production I can have good and bad surprises. Before I had to rip out one already planted field where the seeds were not good but the other field just next to it was wonderful. I’m growing more in diversification and specialization in more challenging ways rather than growing in high quantities.
Tea tourism
We receive visitors. You can book a visit with us with a small degustation or really private extended tasting with a special topic. One can choose origin or colours of tea. We also organize workshops and events. Next year in September or October we want to do a full week event, a celebration week of 15 years of Chá Camélia. We have a beautiful Japanese tea house which will be also included in the activities.
Bring Europeans to honour the leaf
Next to production, the other main objective for me is to introduce Asian tea culture to Europe and to share this experience, bring Europeans in the boat of really honoring the leaf in several infusions and celebrating it and not just throwing it away.
Proudness and curiosity of Portuguese
I think Portuguese are quite curious. They are not tea lovers by genetics, they are coffee drinkers. But there is a super proudness of Portuguese being the first bringing tea to Europe and Catarina Braganza bringing the tea to the English court and so on – all this history. There is an openness, so if I invite somebody for tea produced in Portugal people become enthusiastic and open-minded which is cool. When they taste they perceive that it’s really different and there is kind of a proudness and curiosity. So I feel like a really nice exception being accepted.
Being German and Portuguese
I speak fluent Portuguese since I came here and I came in time when all the Portuguese and the foreigners left Portugal. I came in the crisis so I was going against the stream. By that time people appreciated foreigners coming because it was so crazy, everybody wanted to go away. Now I see myself as half Portuguese, after I have lived 18 years of my life in this country, I have nationality. I applied for it on my own will and I did the whole process of language tests and whatsoever. When people ask me where I am from, I say Germany and Portugal. I really feel it and people also feel it.
My family supported me as they had no other choice. They thought I would get lost in Brazil or Mozambique so Portugal was the smaller damage. At least not so far away. They see what I have built up with the new project, they are really impressed and support me in a very beautiful manner now. In the beginning of course they could not understand. When you don’t see, it takes so long time until you see.
Tea is not a beverage, it’s a life philosophy.
For me tea is a way of life. I don’t want to mystify it too much. I’m a practical person, so I like to go deep, but I don’t want to make too much fuss around it to the outside. For me tea is a very deep experience of living more the rhythm of nature, being more connected especially to nature. In our society it’s more needed than ever. I can feel it when we have visitors. We have the privilege of having tea in nature, it’s all around. Even our tasting room with a super big window is in the middle of the trees. So even if you are inside, you are outside. I can feel it that people don’t want to leave and they really enjoy the moment. There are many people who say: “I haven’t had that for such a long time – just sitting and calming down”.
I live five minutes from the plantation on the ground where I planted the agroforestry. The land where I live belongs to me and where the tea plantation is, it’s from the company of my ex-husband and it’s long-term rental. So for my life span I know what is my task, and for the future I have to give it to the future.
It is a tough road
Even though everything may look so sunny and shining it’s really a tough road. I’m sometimes a bit scared that people think of it that it is really easy going. Because it is not. First of all, because I did something nobody ever did. In that scale, at that time nobody did in Europe, on continental Europe. As I’m stubborn, so I just focused on it to get it done. Obviously, having the doubt like ”oh, this looks not like a tea farm” and then “okay, the other tea places look the same. I can relax.” This was always a big challenge for me. As soon as one challenge passed, then the next challenge came immediately. When I did the first experimental harvest in 2017 I realized that all the time I was so focused on the cultivation of the tea that I completely forgot to think about the difficulty of producing tea. The biggest fear was: “what if it’s a shitty tea?”
I really had planned it out. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have survived the years before. Because it was tough physical work. I did it together with a gardener. It’s not that I rented the company and they ripped out the vines or so on. It was me, the gardener, and then another lady came in. So it happened that I sometimes came home and I just wanted to cry because I could almost not get out of the car. I mean, it was really, really tough because it was a complete from the scratch project with no big financial investment.
When the time of test production came, I was unbearable the night before. I was super grumpy. And my ex-husband asked: “What’s wrong with you? You should be excited as tomorrow is first harvest!” But I was so nervous – what would I do if the tea turned shitty? You can’t expect from your first tea to be good but what if it’s just banal? Four years of tough work! I am telling this to show the obstacles and that this was not just simple. People think: you produce beautiful tea and you serve it in nice restaurants and everything is beautiful. No, no, I was really going through hell that day. So we produced little leaves with our super iron wok, which I was offered from the Morimoto family. And when we tasted it, I was really almost crying. I was so relieved because I could find the thread, the direction and it was already there. And from that moment on, I could just believe it’s going to be good.
And then Morimotos came and I was almost dying in front of them waiting for their feedback tasting my tea. It took a long time, they were talking to each other, and my Japanese failed completely because I was so nervous and they spoke quite a strong dialect, and I couldn’t understand what was going on there. And then Shigeru-san finally lifted his head, smiling at me, and he said in a very neutral voice: “This does not taste Japanese, this does not taste Chinese, this tastes of Fornelo.” And he said the name of the village where we were producing tea. And I was so happy because there was no better proof of terroir.
From then on we professionalized every year our steamed green teas, which was my first intention to produce one kind of tea and really making it as perfect as possible, whatever perfection is. So I was not playing around with black, white or whatever tea, but like the Japanese I was trying to do one thing right. Next year I divided our green teas in the following sorts:the Pre-harvest, the Kintsugi Cha, the Nosso Cha from the main spring harvest, and the Luso Cha from the summer harvest. They all were produced with the same methods of steaming, and then having more artisanal forming and drying process.
In 2019 we had the first real harvest, a bigger one, 12 kilos we blended in one final blend. And we started also selling it as “Nosso cha”. Our first tea we called “Our tea”, in including everybody who feels like our. I thought of Portugal, but it can be bigger, it can be Europe, it can be everywhere.
From that base of green tea I went into direction of Wulong, which is my second love, on the same important level. It is more complicated to produce, so I started with the green. We did it together with Elke when the harvest hadn’t yet started and there were so little leaves. It was so cold, we went out every morning and then came back with one little basket. My dream was making green tea, which is not steamed, but we decided to also let it wither, which is not very common. This is how we invented Rosa do Oriente, our overnight withered and pan-fired green tea, which is a hybrid, it’s not completely green but it’s not yet Wulong.
I feel more freedom producing in a not traditionally producing country, because nobody is judging me. I like this hybrid thing, and the next step was going more to the Wulong production.I already had the machines imported from Taiwan in 2019. But only in 2023 we had the first batch, which was showing nicely, and we brought it with us to the Prague Tea Festival, and we got really beautiful response from many other visitors. It helped me to understand where to follow this track, a new flavor profile and style of tea.
Gratefulness
First, I am grateful to the land I’m privileged to work on and to take care of. It was two hectares, now it is four. I think this is a privilege, hard, but privilege. I have a beautiful land, trees on this land that are very old. This is when you take over something from the past and feel really honoured to work in company of something which was planted way before you were born.
I’m super grateful for the diversity of tea culture. All the tea farmers and the tea connoisseurs and people developing the diversity of teas in the world. Which is fascinating because the more I get to know there’s still a lot to discover. It inspires me a lot and shows me all the possibilities one has to produce tea. There is so much creativity. I feel really free that I don’t have to fit into a category. I see all the diversity and I can just indulge and be inspired.
Grateful to all the people working with me. I’m privileged that people are coming to my project. I never searched – it just happens and it’s usually the right people. Of course, it’s not Disneyland here, we also have conflicts and sometimes it doesn’t work out as you thought. But in general, I think I magically attract the right people. And this is the most important thing. I couldn’t do it on my own. There is this beautiful exchange and so many growth on so many levels. So I’m very grateful for the support of many people. Not just in the production. Also in selling and showing the teas, giving me feedback and courage sometimes when I’m down.
Two weeks ago I was super tired as there was so much happening – so many leaves and things in the office. I was down physically, emotionally, everything. And I had a visitor from Canada, a real tea connoisseur, asking to come, so I could not say “no, we don’t have time”. I had one day that week when we were not processing tea and I agreed to receive her. It is a privilege to receive really deeply interested people. After that afternoon I was very much motivated and the next day again. So I’m also really thankful to everybody bringing interest and feedback and giving us courage to continue.
And I’m thankful to live in Portugal. I think it’s a fascinating country.”
Nina is telling me her story while we are drinking tea.
The interview is written by Aliona Velichko
Photos are provided by Nina Gruntkowski
