Monday, January 28, 2008
Posted by 醉茶生 at 08:41 AM | Comments (0) | Permalink
Categories: Tea Wulong Tea Related

Good tea has vintages in the same way that French wine does.  The flavour of the tea varies every year according to the rainfall and sunshine.  While the tea from one plantation will always have the same basic character, each harvest is unique: some years will be sweeter, other years will be more bitter; some years the scent of cinnamon will be stronger, other years the tea will be smokier; some years the leaf will be lighter, other years heavier.  Each harvest is a unique individual, never to be replicated.

The autumn just gone produced some of the best High Mountain tea Gāoshān chá 高山茶 I have ever tasted.  Miss Neddy gifted me around 80g worth and this morning, I poured out the last few fragments of the precious leaf into my tea cup .  As I poured in the water, the light floral fragrance filled the room and I sipped the last cup of that tea that I will ever taste.  Come the spring, I will buy myself another tin of High Mountain tea, but I know that it will be different and is unlikely to be as good as the one I have just finished.

There is no value in keeping oolong tea or green tea.  The flavours do not mature; instead the fragrance dissipates, the colours darken, and you are left with nothing but a dark insipid fluid to fill your tea cup.  Tea cannot be put into a cellar to be stored; there is no benefit in laying down crates of tea as one does with wine; and so nature enforces a strange kind of democracy, because there is no point buying more leaves than you can reasonably consume yourself before the tea grows too old to drink.  If you are fortunate enough to find a good tea, then enjoy it quickly while it is still young, carpe diem! For next year there will be only memories.

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