A 1933 Tea Sample Still Matches Today's Cup

Somebody put a box of tea away in 1933 and left it there. When chemists finally ran the contents through a modern mass spectrometer, the fingerprint that came back matched a bag of ordinary commercial rooibos bought in 2016 almost line for line. Eighty-three years, a world war, and an entire industry built up out of a mountain range, and the cup did not drift.

A depository, thirty-seven samples, and no particular hurry

The collection in question is known as the Nortier collection, deposited by the Clanwilliam merchant Benjamin Ginsberg, and it holds thirty-seven separate tea samples set aside in 1933. Ginsberg and Dr Pieter le Fras Nortier are the two names that come up whenever anyone explains how rooibos became a crop rather than something you gathered off a hillside, and that story is told properly elsewhere. What matters here is the smaller, quieter act: at the exact moment the industry was being invented, somebody had the presence of mind to keep specimens of what people were actually drinking, label them, and put them somewhere safe.

That is an unglamorous kind of foresight. It produces nothing for decades. It simply sits in a cupboard being a cupboard's worth of dried leaf while the world moves on around it. Then, in 2018, M.A. Stander, T. Brendler, H. Redelinghuys, and B-E. Van Wyk published an analysis of those historic teas in the Journal of Food Composition and Analysis¹, and the cupboard turned out to have been holding two answers at once, one of them to a question nobody had thought to ask.

The method was liquid chromatography paired with high-resolution mass spectrometry, run with electrospray ionisation in negative mode, then handed to multivariate statistics. Stated less grandly: the samples were separated into their component compounds, each compound weighed with considerable precision, and the resulting patterns of flavonoids and phenolic acids compared across every sample to see which compounds reliably told one kind of tea apart from another. A chemical fingerprint, essentially, and one detailed enough to be worth arguing over.

Eighty-three years, and the chromatogram barely blinked

When the researchers compared the chromatogram of the 1933 Nortier-type tea against a commercial cultivated rooibos from 2016, the two traces were virtually identical.

It is worth sitting with what that does and does not mean. It does not mean nothing changed. Everything around the tea changed. In 1933 the plants were still being coaxed into cultivation from wild seed, the processing was small and local, and the market was a few merchants and a good deal of hope. By 2016 rooibos was a global commodity with cultivars, certification, and container ships. And through all of it, the compounds that make the red bush taste and behave the way it does stayed put. The 2016 tea in the shop was, to this analysis, the same substance as the 1933 tea in the box.

Continuity of that order is rarer in food than people assume. Apples have been bred nearly out of recognition inside a century. Wheat, tomatoes, and wine grapes have all been pushed hard toward yield, shelf life, and shipping. Rooibos, so far as thirty-seven jars can testify, was not. The Nortier or "mak tee" cultivated type that came out of the 1930s selection work turned out to be a good enough answer that nobody has felt moved to substantially rewrite it, which is a compliment to the plant and a mild embarrassment to the improving instinct. This is also, incidentally, a useful piece of context for the genetic variety still sitting out in the wild populations: the cup has held steady while the mountain kept its options open.

When an eighty-five-year-old sample and a supermarket packet look the same to a mass spectrometer, the tea your grandmother drank and the tea in your cupboard are, in the ways that can be measured, one and the same drink, not a reconstruction of it and not a revival.

The reed tea that turned out not to be a tea bush at all

The second finding came out of a sample that had been sitting in the collection under the name "riettee," Afrikaans for reed tea. It had a name and no confirmed identity. The 1933 depositors knew perfectly well what it was in the sense that they drank it; the botanical record simply never caught up.

Applying the same chemical and botanical analysis, the researchers identified riettee, for the first time, as a species of Thesium, specifically Thesium macrostachyum and its relatives. This is not a form of rooibos. It is not a cousin of rooibos. Rooibos is Aspalathus linearis, a legume in the pea family, Fabaceae, which is why the bush fixes nitrogen and gets on so well with poor Cederberg sand. Thesium sits in the Santalaceae, the sandalwood family, and is hemiparasitic, meaning it photosynthesises perfectly well on its own account while also tapping the roots of neighbouring plants for water and minerals. A polite freeloader with a day job.

The name was doing honest work all along. Riettee grows among the reed-like Restionaceae of the fynbos, which is where the "reed" came from, and the plants are slender and jointed in a way that suits the description. A box packed away to document one tea ended up preserving the physical evidence needed to identify a different one, eighty-five years later, from a plant family with no relation to it whatsoever.

Lidjiestee is still growing at Wupperthal

Riettee is not only a museum specimen. Thesium macrostachyum still grows around Wupperthal in the Cederberg, and people there still drink it. The local name now is lidjiestee, little reed tea, and it sits inside the same wider world of Cape herbal teas that rooibos itself came out of, a history the record only carries back so far, as the Ministry has noted elsewhere.

And by at least some local accounts, lidjiestee tastes as good as rooibos. Possibly, one hears, better.

The Ministry has considered this carefully and finds it entirely acceptable. The red bush was never appointed to the position by decree, and a mountain range that produced one excellent tea has no obligation to stop at one. If anything, the report is reassuring: the Cederberg is not a monoculture with a marketing department, it is a landscape where people have been quietly trying the local plants for a very long time and keeping the ones that reward the effort. Rooibos won the market. That is a different contest from the one held in somebody's kitchen at Wupperthal, and the Ministry is not the judge of that one.

A merchant set aside thirty-seven samples in 1933 out of what looks like simple tidiness. The samples did nothing at all for eight and a half decades. Then a machine that did not exist when they were sealed read them, confirmed that the tea in your cup has not meaningfully changed since before your grandparents were born, and put a name at last to a jar labelled reed tea, whose plant is at this moment growing among the restios above Wupperthal, in no hurry either.