Usually, I would write about a place, a land, the wind disturbing the fragile balance of the hats of farmers bent by time and sciatica. I would use rhetorical tightrope acts that might seem almost contrived to some, or romantic and evocative to others.
But this time I won’t do any of that, no recycled sensations, no stories about the battles in the Tây Côn Lĩnh mountains or about how this tea recalls that Eastern peace we like to import in small doses into our European afternoons, that peace found in watching Maggie Cheung walk under the rain while time slows down, when everyone holds their breath, diaphragm tensed, as absolutely nothing happens. Things that usually grant every tea a kind of added grandeur, a metropolitan dignity sweetened with a touch of neo-rural nostalgia.
I’m not John O’Hara, and I don’t think people care to see every banal gesture described as a moral battlefield.
So, this is a sheng. We’ve more or less all arrived there. And if I stopped here, I’d already be more honest than most of contemporary gastronomic documentary.
But I believe this is one of those few Pu’er teas that doesn’t need me, or my words, or anyone else’s, to be understood. Roland Barthes saw in photography two fundamental aesthetic elements: the studium, the set of information one needs to know, and the punctum, the element that wounds, that seizes attention and couldn’t care less about the rest, about its translation into prose; it just arrives, contracted like a beast.
It’s in its wet leaves, tremendously fruity and earthy at once, in that quarrel between magnolia, orchid, dandelion root, and Tellicherry pepper that the punctum arises. Barthes would say it’s in that absurd moment of unconditional pleasure that meaning breaks and truth seeps through, like a development flaw on a film roll.
This ancient tall trees tea it’s a bomb wrapped in silk drapes, almost nervously delicate and at the same time powerful. It’s a sip of terroir served at a hundred degrees; it has everything that remains when you strip away the narrative.
The texture is medium-soft; it tastes of pepper and wildflowers, white grapes, juniper, it tastes like that childhood photo with the grain too visible, the one you wish you had but that someone is now romanticizing somewhere on Netflix.
The qi leaves you with a strange calm, almost clinical. The huigan is excellent; the bitterness is low, the astringency absent. The persistence is long, the sip seems to linger there, clinging to the squamous epithelium of your throat like a gentle remorse.
Wild Harvested 
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