Back in July of this year, I wrote a post about how I had discovered the pleasure of Dilmah tea. To give you, gentle reader, a feel for how their teas were grown, I used a wine analogy and wrote...

'Secondly, Dilmah talks about 100% single origin Ceylon (Sri Lanka) tea, packed at the source. To use a wine analogy, that is the equivalent of an estate bottled wine, from grapes grown in their own vineyard versus a wine made from many different vineyards from several different countries. Consider that just about all the most famous wines are estate bottled, single vineyard wines and you start to realize what they are on about, tea with flavour.'

I emailed Dilmah to let them know I had written an article about them and also asked a question about tea quality. Two visits from them were logged on my site meter, but they never responded to my email. I really didn't give it any more thought until last Tuesday week, when I was reading Epicure and noticed a half page Dilmah advertisement on the back page. Here is the copy that caught my eye...

'Let's start with a little history. According to legend, the origin of wine dates back some 7,ooo years, Tea, a little younger at around 5,000 years, none the less shares just as colourful an evolution (including the American Revolution - remember The Boston Tea Party? But we digress...)

It is their similarities in methods of cultivation and harvest, the effect of soils and climates and ultimately the enormously diverse palate of flavours that align tea and wine so closely.

And, just as a single estate wine vintage is often the most coveted, so too do single estate teas command the ultimate respect from aficionados.

So it is with commensurate pleasure that Dilmah introduce the very first range of Single Estate Teas to Australia...'

I emailed Dilmah again, suggesting that there were a lot of similarities between my post and their advertising copy and suggested that they might like to make a donation to a charity here in Australia, again, just like the first time, there was another visit to my site but no reply. I then conversed with someone in the media here in Australia to ask if it was simply that the both of us had thought up the use of this particular wine analogy independent of each other. She replied that she thought she may have seen the analogy before but wasn't certain.

Given that Dilmah say this is the very first introduction of the single estate tea concept, analogous to wine, and it comes some months after my post - that they looked at - it certainly has my whiskers quivering. What I'd like to ask, has anyone seen this particular concept, prior to July of this year?

And Dilmah, given that you like to do charitable work, if you did borrow something from me, how about a donation to charity? You know where I am.