"If tea is your passion, Norwood is your sage and this book is your guide."- Michael Harney in the Christmas catalog of Harney & Sons Fine Teas
The James Norwood Pratt Tea Society
Profile of JNP, by Michelle Williams (1999 Tea Almanac)
Michelle Williams is a freelance writer, editor and longtime tea sipper living in Portland, Oregon. Her profile of JNP appeared in the December 1998 issue of Fresh Cup magazine.
JAMES NORWOOD PRATT - Author. Lecturer
San Francisco. California
Parts historian, connoisseur and world traveller, James Norwood Pratt is the Renaissance man of the tea industry. His fascination with tea has taken him on a 20 year journey into the culture, economics and romance of the beverage—and he's still making side trips along the way.
"I have begun to understand Asian civilization," Pratt says, "by studying this thread of tea. I have been able to understand a great deal about Asian philosophy and thought. Tea is Buddhist communion—and I'd never realized that until studying its history."
The author of The Tea Lover's Treasury and The Tea Lover's Companion has carved out a reputation as the consumate spokesman for US tea consumers. His wit and dedication to the beverage have helped spread the gospel of tea to tens of thousands of people.
Pratt came to tea from wine. He was a successful wine writer whose 1971 book, The Wine Bibber's Bible, sold more than 500.000 copies. He spent much of his time living in the Napa Valley writing wine-related articles.
"And a good life it was until overtaken by alcoholism," Pratt says. "I turned to tea when I quit drinking alcohol, and I brought to it the same kind of interest in critical tasting and appraising. Both are products of agriculture and also works of art."
Pratt has been a writer his entire life, but he's dedicated the past 18 years to tea. His beloved classic—The Tea Lover's Treasury—published in 1982, is a compendium of tea history, lore and information from all over the world. In 1995 he released The Tea Lover's Companion which included practical facts on tea types, accoutrements, tearooms and importers.
"I'm very fortunate to have found a subject—unless the subject found me—that I can preach and rave about, while constantly steeping new pots of it." Pratt says, laughing.
While Pratt did not start out a tea expert, he certainly has become one. "The job of a writer," he says, "is, in large measure, to be a student. You have to be keenly interested. You can't write about just anything. I was able to transfer to tea the great love I had for wine and study it with close attention."
In 1997 Pratt served as editor-in-chief of Tea Trade, the magazine of the world tea business. The first two issues succeeded and 12,000 copies of each were distributed to the trade world-wide. Unfortunately. the funding partner had a near-fatal heart attack after the second issue, and production was halted. For the moment. anyway.
"I have not declared it dead yet," Pratt says. "I'm hoping that circumstances will be right for it to come back to life,. because supporting a business magazine—not a consumer magazine, of course—is a signal that an industry has come of age."
And Pratt is doing all he can to encourage this coming of age. In an effort to create a higher level of connoisseurship in the tea industry, he is currently outlining a new book: The World Atlas of Tea. "You have to have the geography and the local lore around a product like tea, just the same as you do around a product like wine" Pratt explains.
Much of Pratt's current career is as a lecturer to a wide variety of audiences on tea, its history and its industry trends. At World Affairs Councils he speaks about tea and international economics while also explaining the history of tea in bridging East and West. He lectures regularly at the Fancy Food Shows and has been the keynote speaker for every Harney Tea Summit—an annual tea conference—since the first one.
"Fortunately, I like to talk" Pratt laughs. "I have a grasp of the subject, and therefore I'm able to be a pretty good teacher. I enjoy it, and I think I'm able to convey my enthusiasm."
As part of on-going education efforts for the tea industry. Pratt played an instrumental role in organizing the American Premium Tea Institute (APTI). Eventually he would like to see APTI work with Congress to re-instate a governmental mechanism for gathering information and import statistics for the industry.
His excitement for the industry never wanes. "There is so much that can happen in the years ahead of us," he muses. "Two years ago chai was a cottage industry. Now it is a $16 million a year business. That's zero to $16 million in 24 months!"
Pratt believes the time is right for the current tea boom, partly because the public is looking for beverages that contrast with coffee. Tea is more subtle, Pratt says, and the public enjoys that. "There is nothing subtle about coffee," he says. "It comes from the bean. The bean is the seed of the plant, and any plant is designed to make sure that the seed is the last thing that is going to be stressed."
This protection results in much less variety. Tea,. on the other hand, is made from the leaf,. which is essentially the skin of the plant. It will register day-to-day humidity and the like,. changing every day.
"You're tasting the weather that was brought in out of that field," Pratt explains. "So it's very subtle. There is nothing in this world that we can taste that is any subtler than the taste of tea."
It is the subtlety,. beauty and ceremony of tea that Pratt sees as appealing to the fast-paced American public. "Tea is one of those things that always makes you feel just a little bit more civilized," Pratt says. "In this time and in this society that demands more and more of us and delivers less and less, people are turning to tea, in part, out of a thirst for beauty."
Pratt mainly drinks tea in the Chinese style—from the classic Chinese guywan, which is the Mandarin word for "covered cup." It is both steeping vessel and drinking cup and Pratt drinks a wide variety of teas in this fashion regardless of the tea's origin.
He enjoys his role as industry informer and wants to continue to educate tea professionals in matters of this sort so that they, in turn, can pass it on to the consumer.
"When you think about it, wine was not a part of the American way of life just 30 years ago," Pratt says, "and it certainly is today. We in the tea industry need to follow that example."