Where There’s Tea, There’s Hope
Daniela Cubelic of Silk Road Tea is Weathering the Storm in our Teacups
woRds and iMaGes by simon oGden
Victoria is an attractive city, in more ways than one: she’s a looker, of course. But on a deeper level, she entices people who value authenticity, creativity, and nature. Perhaps no local business better serves these appetites than Silk Road Tea.
Its company values of “premium quality ingredients, exceptional customer service, an eco-friendly approach, and a commitment to community” have proven a successful recipe, one that has kept aromatic, uplifting decoctions flowing from the edge of Chinatown for an astonishing thirty years.
These values were codified by founder Daniela Cubelic, nationally celebrated as both a certified tea master and an entrepreneur. She shares her passion and knowledge with an erudite cheerfulness, as lively and endearing as a steaming cup of Darjeeling. Considering her company’s three decades of accolades and growth, it’s striking how little she takes for granted.
“My whole motto right now is ‘surviving is thriving,’” Cubelic says, discussing the ever-mounting trials afflicting agriculturally dependent businesses.
“Climate change has been hitting tea-growing countries for longer than most have been aware of in North America.” Not to mention the tightrope navigation of the pandemic and the supply-chain calamity courtesy of the relentless war in Ukraine. “It’s a victory that we’re still here.”
When the lockdowns first dropped, Cubelic assumed she would be busy coming up with new teas “to help people escape.” But the reality was surprising: “What became apparent early on is that what people actually craved was comfort.” Which meant consistency, familiarity. “I had better not run out of elderflower, because if we don’t have Angelwater [an herbal bestseller of elderflower, spearmint, lavender, and rose], people will lose their minds.”
There is a population divide between those of us who relax into the comfort of reliable sameness (mass-market beer, double doubles, et al.) and those who seek inconsistency, chasing novelty with curious palates and restless cravings. Silk Road has long been a destination for adventurous tea lovers. But even the intrepid consumer, overwhelmed by the uncertainty of our current climate, may find themselves a creature of habit, seeking a steadying anchor against today’s many storms. For any business committed to a purely organic product, uniformity of flavour is becoming exponentially harder to achieve.
In Silk Road’s early days, only an occasional climate anomaly would affect tea crops. “We’ve had hard-weather years before, and seen lowered harvests, or ingredients not tasting as good, but then it would normalize.” About fifteen years ago, however, Cubelic began to see stark shifts in flavour profiles, with producers talking to her about how rainfall patterns were starting to profoundly affect the plants. Harvest season got shorter, interspersed with freak hailstorms and heatwaves. Tea started to change.
“I’d be selling customers their favourites, and they’d say, ‘This isn’t the same tea. Did you change where you get it from?’ And I’d tell them it’s the weather that’s changing the plants, and a lot of them had trouble believing me.” There has been some climate change coverage in the media about this of late, mostly focusing on coffee and wine, but it can be a hard case to make to the consumer when the northern hemisphere is only just beginning to experience the extreme weather that has been affecting areas in the south.
It’s getting harder to source the purely organic tea that Silk Road mandates too, as growers respond with increased use of fertilizers and pesticides. Crops grow quicker and with greater yields, but the plants are stripped of their natural resilience.
Commercial fertilizers are junk food for plants—they make them grow quickly but don’t make them healthy. Then you need pesticides to manage because they lose their robust immune systems.
With her dedication to organic products, Cubelic has to be proactive about education to counter increasing claims of “this used to taste better”—the “better” here meaning what I’m used to. Even without accelerated climate change, tea is a living thing that has never claimed a rigid consistency. Industrial companies realized generations ago that selling bags of stale tea ensures cheap conformity, akin to the over-roasting tactics of the mammoth commodity-coffee industry. Many so-called high-end tea companies that appeared on the crest of the loose-leaf fad of the late 2000s mask stale tea and off flavours through blending with additives and artificial flavouring (red velvet cake tea?), forcing consistency.
Products masquerading as “wellness teas” that list “artificial flavours” (there are a lot out there, it turns out) are a unique affectation, as the health benefits of tea in its natural form are a big part of its popularity—especially here in Victoria, where wellness is steeped into the culture. Antioxidant levels and flavour are correlative in tea—antioxidants are a representation of immune response to environment, which translates to complexity of aroma and taste. When immunity is compromised, tea’s health benefits and deliciousness dwindle.
The reality is that climate change is rapidly changing plantation terroir, so tea now grows in a fundamentally different ecosystem than it did a mere fifteen years ago. We can’t expect it to continue to taste the same. The industry, like coffee and wine, is adapting through breeding and selection programs to cultivate resilient plants, but agricultural change is maddeningly slow. In the short term, Cubelic remains committed to transparency with her customers, which includes telling them the real story of what’s in the cup.
“There are beautiful ideas stemming from Asian culture around the appreciation of fleeting beauty,” she says. “We have to apply more of that to our understanding of food.” She is fond of the traditional Japanese notion of “72 Seasons,” an observance of smaller steps of cyclical change that embraces impermanence and constant fluctuation within ecosystems.
As for how her business is dealing with current circumstances, Cubelic says she is prioritizing the care of her staff and core customers, and she seems quite comfortable working within the limitations of the day. “This isn’t a moment to be taking leaps and bounds, trying to make big profits and running our people into the ground. For Silk Road, this is a moment of being in service, of bringing comfort and ease. Our customers need beauty, they need sanctuary, and they need beautiful connections.”
