Richard Ross

speaker

110 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 23 Jul

Richard Ross’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.

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Science Weekly · Revisited: A Scottish tea mystery, episode three – a bag for life · 23 Jul 2026 podcast

We all had elements but weren't able to really see everything that was going on and piece together the sort of scale of the fraud.

It's true that he did spark a lot of interest in the potential for Scottish tea, but it was all based on a lie.

I think the fact that there are established plantations in Scotland doing well are more a tribute to one grower in the north of Italy providing us with viable plants.

I continue to be a fan of tea.

I realize I'm not going to make my millions out of a tea plantation, but there's plenty of other ways to be involved in tea.

I enjoy talking about tea and encouraging people to drink the best tea that they possibly can.

Although in Scotland we haven't been growing tea for very long, lots of different tea growing regions around the world were really sort of instigated and grown by Scots.

So we do have a very strong historical connection with tea.

And there is a new chapter of Scottish grown tea, which is exciting.

It'll always be a small sort of boutique industry, but a really interesting one.

Science Weekly · Revisited: A Scottish tea mystery, episode two – the list · 22 Jul 2026 podcast

The Balmoral Hotel, perhaps one of the most obviously prestigious hotels in Edinburgh, was selling an all-Scottish list of teas in their tearoom.

I had a look at the list which was sitting on a lectern at the entrance to the tea room, beautifully bound over multiple pages, all divided into different sections of the different styles of tea.

And each of the teas with this nice, sort of attractive, quite flowery name and a little description of 100 words or so about the geographical location and some of the specifics of the area where it had been grown.

And, you know, some of the wording, it clearly was very specific to some of the people I knew.

You know, I knew where all the Scottish tea plantations were, but I also knew that those tea plantations hadn't actually produced any tea yet because their plants were so young.

So I took some pictures of the light list on my phone, circulated it to the other growers, and understandably the owners of those plantations got quite kind of irate about this.

The idea that he was maybe doing something that was a little bit unethical transformed into us feeling that this was something that was really deception and fraud.

So at that point, we sent an email to Food Standards Scotland and their criminal investigation division.

So I had a long sort of email correspondence with him where we found out little by little these nuggets of information about the fact that really all the plants that we had been supplied had come not from a propagation in a greenhouse in Perthshire, but almost direct from the shores of Lake Maggiore.

We were quite shocked, but on the other hand, we were almost relieved because it started to allow us to unravel some of the stories behind the plants that we got.

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