What happens to a Teabuyer who has come down with a cold from hell, can’t smell nor taste anything, and then your second in command also comes down with a cold? What if you lost your voice and can’t negotiate? And dizzy from medication? with an eye infection? Will I be choosing the tea, blind, dumb, and palate-less? With just sheer instinct?
Well, Buddhists would say, everyday is a good day- somewhere, for someone.
Mrs. Su, the other superwoman of tea, was in good spirits today. All 3 sons are now in college, and my annual gifts of chocolate are yet still welcome, a ritual I have had since the youngest son was 8 years old. There is no harvest just yet, and she managed to find some previous year’s Royal Courtesan. A very small amount for some die hard customers. I can’t taste nor smell anything this time, having had a severe cold. But I trust her.
After consecutive 3-4 years of looking finally I found the seeds she wanted- to grow the village’s biggest cabbage, bigger than some other woman in the village who has been bragging about her cabbage. I know that other woman couldn’t compete on the tea. And I wanted Mrs Su to win. After all these years of her taking care of our Tung Ting and Charcoal Roasted Oolongs, it is a small favor to return!
Sun Moon Lake is known for an altogether different Taiwan tea few people know about: Red Tea, or Hongcha. Originally, the local varietal was just called Shan Cha or Mountain Tea. Then, Assam varietals were planted over 100 years ago believing it would put Taiwan on the map in the world stage of tea, back then. Now, things have gone full circle: new varietals invented by the Taiwanese Research Institutes called Ruby 18, and the much improved Ruby 21, are now made into fully oxidized red/ black teas with distinct characters that reflect the Taiwanese terroir…
No one can do rice like the Hakka. Rice flour made into soft salad rolls filled with peanuts and sprouts, or a more traditional version of super large mochi filled with pickled vegetables in soup- both are impossibilities in the hands of anyone but the Hakka tribal people. Soft but springy, glutinous yet thin to absorb the taste of the ingredients. Everyday food or divine culinary gift.
Superwoman Miss Lin met a woe this year. Seems like, many people are having an unsmooth year. Her tea production facility burned down 1 month ago and we arrived to see her making tea in her bonsai garden. Elegant, calm, and unruffled always, we had a fantastic dinner, some of her second place winner Taiwan Beauty tea, and marvel at her pluck- she is going to reconstruct her facility and add a classroom for tourists to try their hand at making tea themselves next year. That spirit is classic for the Hakka tribal people like her- about 100 years ago, when the bugs completely ravaged his crop, the undaunted Hakka tribesman made a fantastic, unique tea with the damaged leaves, turning it into one of the tea treasures on earth- the Taiwan Beauty oolong.
