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Day 1: sudden bursts of heavy rain, punctuated by fluttering…

Tea Adventures

Day 1: sudden bursts of heavy rain, punctuated by fluttering butterflies, whizzing dragonflies, and songs of frogs hidden amongst puddles. Our group of tea aficionados braved the elements to taste Baochong oolong first hand. Their feedback? Indescribable sweetness and fresh aroma, unlike any Baochong they have ever tasted. Of course there was the freshness factor. The batch we tasted had been harvested late afternoon the night before and made just minutes ago, and went from baking oven to Gaiwan. That and on top of it all, steeped with the water from their mountain spring.

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The fog rolled in and all the world was a white milky haze….

Tea Adventures

The fog rolled in and all the world was a white milky haze. Hiking up steep inclines of 70 degrees at times, we huffed and puffed to the top of the world: the world of tea that is, at 2000 meters. Paying homage to the High Mountain oolongs is crucial to anyone considering themselves tea enthusiasts, and climbing a hill that high and that steep allows one to fully understand what ‘High Mountain’ means.
San Lin She, Taiwan, is home to huge purple blue bamboo groves, ginkgo trees and fragrant flowers, and one of the world’s most sought after oolong teas, with an intense floral fragrance all its own unforgettable character.
The tour group struggled to the top before the view was completely obscured. Thankfully the rolling curves of tea bushes were magnificent and plentiful in view for the strenuous hike to be worthwhile!

We tasted a crop harvested 2 days ago, and it was rich and floral. The considerable drought means the taste will be more intense than other years. Each cup of High Mountin oolong is evocative of the energy of the mountain, and all the drama and tragedies of a global weather changes that the tea plants struggle to adapt to. We taste and remember each differing year- like meeting a new friend each time, some more to our liking than others, all came with their own story.

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Sunrise at Tung Ting mountain Good tea grows on great…

Tea Adventures

Sunrise at Tung Ting mountain

Good tea grows on great environments. At top of Tung Ting Mountain, the air is clean and crisp, and layers of distant surrounding mountains peer through the considerable fog that shroud the hilltops. Tea needs good constant fog to nourish the leaves; hard drenching rain causes root problems and waters down the taste. The good news is, there has been no rain for 50 days now and the tea is excellent- fragrant and full bodied. The bad news is there will be less than half the normal yield as such a drought is too extreme. Global climate changes are varying too much for farmers who rely on the farmer’s almanac, and as we trekked through the mountains today, hardly anyone was picking tea and no one was producing.
Alas, being a farmer, even a tea farmer, is not so glamorous. No matter how skillful a producer you are, you can not control the weather.

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A bomb dropped when Mrs. Su took out her dowry oolong, one that…

Tea Adventures

A bomb dropped when Mrs. Su took out her dowry oolong, one that is now 20 years old. She has been carefully tending and roasting and aging it since the day she brought it over on her marriage. The tour group was floored. They could not believe how smooth, how utterly lacking astringency, how energetically it completely changed and grounded them. One of the tea enthusiasts declared: ‘If this tea doesn’t get you to enlightenment, then you can’t get enlightened!’ Mrs. Su generously steeped this tea 8 times.
This year has extensive drought, which means the teas are fantastic but the yield is low. The poor farmers like Mrs Su are too conscientious to raise the prices if the teas are superior than last year, nor will they raise the prices because of scarcity. They will just suffer the financial shortage, life and death according to weather. But the charcoal roasted oolong was so sweet and balanced and fiery all at once; Mrs. Su is no doubt the pro of the pros. The tourists have come to realize: she is the real deal, and one person declared: she is a national treasure!
Mrs. Su’s big dream though? Grow a bigger cabbage than her neighbor.

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Wild ginger flowers Mr. Chen’s farm is small and filled with…

Tea Adventures

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.

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The elegant tea house at Miss Lin’s farm called Yi Ming, in…

Tea Adventures

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.

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