Grace Rare Tea Grace Rare Tea 50 W. 17th St., ...

Grace Rare Tea is a rare kind of business. It is one of the few places, aside from Buckingham Palace, where certain Asian countries are still referred to as Formosa and Ceylon. In the serious tea trade, colonial rules still apply.

Grace Tea owner Richard Sanders does not stand out just for the rarefied names he uses when referring to two countries from which he imports his stock (the others are China and India). He may be one of the few remaining New Yorkers who calls the W. 17th St. area where he works Sofi (South of Flat Iron).

Sanders, a gentleman with snow-white hair and thick black-framed glasses, has run the loose tea business with his wife Marguerite since they purchased it from its original owner, a Chinese importer by the name of Frank Cho, in 1979. Previously, Sanders ran China Bowl Trading Company, a Brooklyn-based importer of sauces, spices and ingredients like mushrooms and tiger-lily buds from China.

The gentility surrounding Grace Rare Tea is so much what you would expect that actually encountering it comes as a surprise. The stately offices are quiet and still, with handsome sculptures of clipper ships?Grace's logo?that are as static as the setting. Much of the decor dates back to Sanders' earlier days in China, where he spent some of his first years as the son of a career naval officer in the 1930s.

"This carpet was something we bought in China," Sanders tells me, "and the screen behind me." He points from the seat of a comfortable-looking chair. "When I say 'we,'" he clarifies, "I was about six years old."

The 1.3 to 1.4 percent of the tea market that Grace represents is the so-called orthodox, or hand-plucked tea, sector. It takes 2000 to 3000 individually picked leaves to make a pound. The quality of the tea is undeniable?results from a recent three-year scientific study on how to brew the perfect cup confirmed loose tea's supremacy. However, movements like Fair Trade that educate consumers on the harsh existences of many coffee and tea laborers have stripped "hand-plucked" tea of some of its cachet.

Sanders describes the alternative, the "crush tear cut" process of harvesting that produces 96 percent of teas on the market (mostly bagged), as though it were rape.

"The tea is machine-harvested and a big lawn-mower-type device goes by and picks up leaves," he says, swooping his arms like scythes, "And mechanically removes the stems, all in one step? As Lipton used to say, and it stuck, it's a brisk cup of tea." This helps to explain why, despite being based in the city where the tea bag was invented, Grace Rare Tea only recently started selling filter bags for brewing.

Phrases that one might reserve for wines, such as "mouth filling" and "complex," are the ones Sanders commonly uses when discussing his blends. A good tea taster, he says, "can tell you which side of the hill it comes from." His precise, award-winning blends seem to merit the vocabulary. The most popular of the blended teas?the Winey Keemun English Breakfast?combines Chinese Keemun (from the Chinese region of Keemun), Formosa Keemun and three to five other varieties.

Grace's 14 teas, including black teas, greens, oolongs and tisanes, are available through mail order and at stores like Dean & Deluca, Zabar's, Grace Market and Garden of Eden for around $30 per pound.

Switching from bagged tea to their tea, he says, "is like drinking wine from the Midi in France and then drinking a Burgundy. It just knocks your socks off."