I'm a tea drinker: always have been, always will be. So I was quite disappointed with this film, which is focused very narrowly on a Marin County tea maniac and his efforts to establish a wholesale business that will also help independent Chinese farmers maintain a sustainable, pesticide free industry. That's all well and good, but the lecturing, hectoring tone of ugly American tea evangelist David Lee Hoffman is tiresome and vaguely offensive. Hoffman seems to be a self-taught expert: he lived in Asia for a decade (without, apparently, bothering to learn any local languages) but doesn't seem to have any formal training in the science or art of tea growing. He's a tea pornographer: he sticks his nose in a bag of tea leaves and knows good tea when he smells it. Fellow tea drinker James Norwood Pratt is even more enthusiastic: he actually thinks that, by drinking a cuppa, we can replicate and share the experiences of Queen Victoria. There's surely a decent tea documentary to be made, but unfortunately, this isn't it.
Review of All in This Tea
