A number of tea enthusiasts chime in on the unique taste of their beloved beverage throughout “All in This Tea,” with “indescribable” being the most common refrain. One expert who does venture a description promptly summons the adjectives “buttery” and “vegetal.” In other words, this documentary, which was co-directed by Les Blank and Gina Leibrecht and makes its premiere Friday at Cinema Village, is not geared toward converting philistines who drink tea without social ritual or, worse, from bags. More than the mere mouthpiece for giddy tea lovers that it initially appears to be, “All in This Tea” is an appealing, if not finely drawn, portrait of an American tea importer named David Lee Hoffman.

The film follows Mr. Hoffman on a routine trip to China to buy teas, mostly from farmers in remote rural areas (some of which are photographed to striking effect on Mr. Blank’s handheld video camera). For much of the film, the California-bred Mr. Hoffman dons the uniform of a self-styled adventurer — cream-colored suit, Panama hat — but shows little of the concomitant tendency to grandstand. A quietly impassioned advocate of organic, “sustainable” methods of farming, Mr. Hoffman seems to relish palming a clump of dirt teeming with worms as much as he does quaffing a perfectly steeped cup of oolong.

Running at a brief 69 minutes, “All in This Tea” contains a few breezy history lessons and many shots of Mr. Hoffman rapturously sniffing fresh tea leaves. Our guide also spends several extended scenes essentially acting as an intermediary between the farmers who grow the teas he loves and the representatives of a Chinese tea manufacturer whom he tries to persuade of the benefits of all things organic and the value of preserving national tea-making traditions. Mr. Hoffman is well aware that these company men regard the small farmers as impediments to progress; he seems less aware that they often look upon him with a measure of polite bemusement.

Mr. Blank is perhaps best known for documenting some of the German filmmaker Werner Herzog’s more outrageous stunts, such as eating his shoe (1980’s “Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe”) and hauling a large ship over a mountain (1982’s “Burden of Dreams”). Mr. Herzog appears briefly in “All in This Tea,” and it is a mild musing of his that provides the documentary with its title.

One of Mr. Herzog’s trademark doomful, esoteric pronouncements about the twilight of civilization, however, might not have been entirely out of place here. During longer scenes, the filmmakers eschew the genial peppering of fun facts to create a palpable sense of tension between the ways of the past and the future. In these moments, “All in This Tea” quietly becomes (somewhat like a cautiously optimistic, scaled-down version of the recent “Up the Yangtze,” which took the massive Three Gorges Dam as its subject) a contemplative snapshot of a Chinese landscape and culture in dramatic transition.