The tour group with Mrs. Su, famed for her Tung Ting oolongs roasted by Charcoal pits.
Wild ginger flowers Mr. Chen’s farm is small and filled with…
Wild ginger flowers
Mr. Chen’s farm is small and filled with fragrant flowers of a different sort. These wild ginger flowers are not only intensely fragrant, they are also sweet and alluringly intoxicating. That would be the description for his Honey Jia Long, the tea he invented. We were treated to a spicy, unbelievable version of it that Mr. Chen has aged for 4 years or so, and everyone’s minds and palates were blown away. How can tea be this good? It was after all, difficult to get people’s attention. The tour group had been treated to some fried tempura tea leaves and tea oil tossed rice noodles for lunch cooked by Mrs. Chen. And now, to experience a tea this good to top off that lunch. The group was in heaven.
The elegant tea house at Miss Lin’s farm called Yi Ming, in…
The elegant tea house at Miss Lin’s farm called Yi Ming, in Miaoli, central Taiwan.
Day two of the tea tour, and my fellow travelers declare: best to call it the ‘Food and Tea Tour’ in the future. The truth is, if you followed the tea buyer, and in this case, me, around buying tea from farms and producers, inevitably, you would be eating through the trip. All the local cuisines, produces, flavors, textures, are outrageously plentiful, colorful, and a feast for all the senses. One can not merely go on a tea tour with me; it will be a food tour as well. Hakka food was on the agenda.
Today, we ended up in Miaoli to visit with the Taiwan Beauty producer Miss Lin at her estate called Yi Min. This is a tea estate unlike any other. A playground, a paradise of sorts, a home, a business, an extremely personalized and quirky elegant compound with the scent of osmathus following you through mazes of oversize bonsai, beautiful roosters who gawk and fly around, a lily pond of sleeping lillies, a restaurant that the travelers declare to be the best Chinese food ever eaten (then I have to remind them this is Taiwanese Hakka territory, Chinese is way too broad a term), a tea house with antiquated furnishings from the 18th century. Miss Lin’s private paradise can be sampled exquisitely if you can taste that elegance in her tea, and vice versa. One can only truly understand why her tea wins so many awards when one takes in all of what she does, and all so well.
Called Pongfong cha by the natives, Taiwan Beauty is a unique oolong. Buds of smaller and smaller sizes compete for the nearly microscopic cicadas to come and chew on them, creating a symbiotic relationship. The bugs get the astringent juices from the tea they love, and we get bug bites that draw out the perfumes, the aromatic essential oils in the leaves, to the surface. The result is an intensely aromatic texture on the palate, a honey tone balanced with ripe apple syrup. No words can merely describe this tea. One can’t call oneself a tea drinker without having experienced Taiwan Beauty, and Miss Lin makes the most outstanding version we can find.
Mid day tea pickers hard at work, if only for an hour of daylight…
Mid day tea pickers hard at work, if only for an hour of daylight before a typhoon hits. Baochong oolong will be sparse this season…
Taiwan Tour 2012
A group of nine travels with me this week, to brave typhoons, landslides, mosquitoes, centipedes, and what other calamities may befall, only to experience some of the most sublime teas in the world few of us will ever experience otherwise. The day begins in Wenshan, near Taipei, to visit with Mr. Lee, one of the most decorated award winning producers of Baochong Oolong.
Wenshan, home of Baochong oolong, a sometimes shockingly fragrant…
Wenshan, home of Baochong oolong, a sometimes shockingly fragrant tea. Little wonder; Mr. Lee lines his hills with not only fragrant flowers, but fragrant fruits like pineapples, kumquats, pomelos…