Wild Harvested

Author: wildharvestedtea

  • Seven Essence Darjeeling Scorsese red

    Seven Essence Darjeeling Scorsese red

    This was the last tea of 2024 and the first of the new year. It was a tough, exhausting year. Dealing with the pain of loss, with the sense of emptiness, of being unmoored from the warmth of everyday life and the luxury of the habit of affection, I believe is the greatest thing that nature can ask a human being to face. For the first time in ten years, tea was not at the center of a significant moment, it was a palliative, something secondary, the translation of the search for a cure.

    What had always fascinated me about tea and its aging, its ontological tension between existing in the moment and thriving in a higher dimension, its transitory nature suspended between being and dissolving, the form and its annihilation, from that moment also applied to human life in a cruder and crueler way than I had ever experienced.

    This tea, the @sevenessenceofficial Scorsese was a companion, a ferryman between the days that followed one another without apparent sense. Sipping it is like tasting the truth, it is like watching a painting by Francis Bacon come to life, built with one brushstroke of flesh and blood after another.

    With that note of Sacher and cinnamon, of burley tobacco, of wenge, of leather and smoke, it initially presents itself as a dark and gloomy shot governed by soft lighting, with a corner set up for a sweet Christmas, all mistletoe and songs, in a untidy apartment plastered with references to art deco in the hallucinatory New York seen through the alienated and feverish gaze of Travis in Taxi Driver.

    When the world seems too hard, when losses pile up and the weight becomes unbearable, tea I believe offers a refuge, which is a greater blessing than we are often granted. It is not an escape, but a return to what is essential, and in its cheering sip pervaded by the aromas of condensed milk, apricot, vanilla and chocolate is what this tea embodies, it is like us, it resists, it keeps us standing, it appears in our lives like diegetic music, as that stranger who suddenly puts on a swing piece in a now-dimmed room in the middle of a bad night, convincing us to give life a dance once again.

  • Climate crisis, Darjeeling and Sublime. Seven Essence Darjeeling summer Ochre

    Climate crisis, Darjeeling and Sublime. Seven Essence Darjeeling summer Ochre

    Despite the climate crises, landslides and hydrogeological disasters that have brought the Himalayas to their knees in the last decade, some corners of this land continue to surprise, returning results beyond the imagination, overcoming difficulties and uncertainties.

    Ochre is a Darjeeling tea, created using the AV2 cultivar, with golden leaves, twisted like the enigmatic smile of Klimt’s Judith, pleased in her languid gaze.
    Born from a thirsty summer, now the umpteenth, it reveals notes of cocoa, malt and buckwheat, then grants aromas of grilled beetroot, cherry brownies and maple syrup.

    Just like in Judith, in this tea lives that something that seduces but leaves a sense of uneasiness, showing that power, which was once attributed only to art, to evoke ambivalent sensations.
    Klimt transformed Judith’s heroic gesture, the killing of the Assyrian general Holofernes to free his people in an act that sublimates partly as a hedonic symbol and partly as a manifesto of an uncertain era and it is in these terms that Ochre places itself.

    The spring harvests are now the children of continuous cycles of drought and violent rains, an alternation of moments of climatic inactivity and destructive floods and in front of the intensity of teas like this I ask myself what and how much we risk losing, and the answer is things like these.

    The sublime is linked to terror, and terror is all the more terrible when linked to the worst fear for man, that is, loss. It takes us beyond the sensitive abyss and is the intersection between a sense of anguish that manifests itself as a shiver and that Laetitia as Schiller described it, that dazzling sense of bliss.

    And in part teas like these bring us back to this condition, to the fear that things like these may one day not be there or exist in such a different proportion that we forget what was there before.

    In its softness, in its caramelized, buttery and lactic aromas, this tea is an encounter between pleasure and meaning, between sensorial beauty and contemplative introspection, transforming its aromatic expression into an experience not only of taste, but of eternal beauty.

  • Beyond the ordinary concept of craftsmanship. Seven Essence Darjeeling Gossamer

    Beyond the ordinary concept of craftsmanship. Seven Essence Darjeeling Gossamer

    There are teas that are indifferent, inexpressive, flat, that simply fill a cup and others that nourish the soul, an expression of the genius loci, resistant, a symbol of those who bear witness to a story, to a place, to bring tea to its highest expression.

    Darjeeling has suffered in the last twenty years from the abuse of its name, from that condition of dissatisfaction for its unexpressed potential, from the awareness of being able to openly declare itself as one of the best terroirs in the world but that for a commercializing inspiration such a condition was denied.

    But to paraphrase Jasper, just as we don’t think of the disease of the shell when admiring its pearl, so when faced with the vital force of the work we don’t think of the cause, the agony that are perhaps the condition of its birth.

    Teas like Gossamer are not just a drink, but an expression of the soul of the terroir, the sublimation of a commitment that goes beyond the ordinary concept of “craftsmanship”, each sip is a meditation on the essence of beauty: the struggle between time and the moment, the fleetingness of a pleasure that persists only as a memory, a retro-olfactory photograph of everything that matters in that instant.

    Plucked from the B157 cultivar, its perfume is complex, polyhedric, like a work of art that always reveals new details with every attempt to decipher its chromatism. It immediately shows an almost ethereal tone that announces its subtle finesse. The aromas of chamomile blend with those of olive oil, lavender and a mango sorbet, then a bouquet opens up characterized by the scent of Aleppo soap, chrysanthemum, orchard grass, water spinach.

    The sip is persuasive, creamy, persistent with an incorruptible freshness and lets a clear return of sweetness emerge, that sweetness that consecrates a Darjeeling tea at the peak of its expression.

  • An echo of a higher truth. MST old master Dong Ding spring 2024

    An echo of a higher truth. MST old master Dong Ding spring 2024

    Taiwan is a mountainous land, rich in those peaks that seem to incessantly support the weight of the world, they are the vertebrae of the backbone of a country, the reflection of a collective history written on the skin of the earth.
    The island has a completely autonomous historical path compared to what is thought and has been affected over the centuries by flows of different cultures whose destinies have been inextricably intertwined with those of the aboriginal populations.

    Nantou is the county that has perhaps been the home of this intricate cultural fabric more than any other, hosting the tattooed faces of the Tàiyǎ, the Shào zú animal and head hunters, the Bùnóng with their polyvocal music and the Zōu with their hats adorned with eagle and blue pheasants feathers.

    In the main village of Dong Ding there is an 80-year-old master still able to work the enchantment, to orchestrate that transformation born of time and tradition, of those invisible threads that bind the present generation to those who have seen the last sunset and those who have not yet been nourished by the first dawn, to create a tea that would have made even Edmund Burke smile more than once.

    When I tasted this Mountain Stream Teas roasted QingXin small batch oolong for the first time I found that magic, that alchemical matrix that Oakeshott defined as “practical knowledge”, a form of knowledge that cannot be explained or reduced to explicit rules but that manifests itself in doing, acting and being. Making a tea like this is not only a work of technical mastery but is a delicate art that feeds on habits, abnegation and rites, it is an order that transcends mere human will, an echo of a higher truth.

    The sip, which finds its roots in those sedimentary and volcanic soils, has a deeply complex character, with hints of mango, wild honey and light resinous nuances. In those subsoils rich in silicates, feldspars and volcanic clay, the concept of tea as a symbolic substance is shaped, leaves like these are imbued with poetry, they become ceremonies of knowledge, extracts of life, and it is this poetic principle that restores the pleasure of existence to sacrifice.

    In its notes of chestnuts, poached pears, cooked lychees the taste shows off a plastic clarity that does not allow itself to be intimidated by any rhetorical exercise, it shows an almost unexpected, vibrant, sharp purity, a sort of historiography of the soul, silent and secret.

  • Darjeeling, a refuge of perpetual change. Seven Essence Darjeeling Villanelle

    Darjeeling, a refuge of perpetual change. Seven Essence Darjeeling Villanelle

    Among those mountains where even the fogs seem to recognize themselves, always the same, the sun makes its way over the peaks of Darjeeling in that way that only northern India can do, with those sunsets stained with scarlet red as if a cup of tea had spilled in the skies.

    Among the big brands, the massive and hypertrophic estates, it is hard to believe that there is a world of artists in constant ferment. In Darjeeling, breathing is instead punctuated by two incredibly deep breaths, one is that of tradition, the other is that of an unprecedented contemporaneity, creator of teas that have become a symbol of the new future: bold, powerful, and often, undeniably, modern.

    Spring teas like Villanelle hold within them the extraordinary nature of spring, in its scents of dried magnolia, citrus, hydrangea and winter melon they seem to reconstruct the triumph of Rubens and Brueghel the Elder’s Eden, an explosion of renewed vegetation, an aromatic encyclopedia of the natural world accompanied by that body, that powerful carnal plasticity of the baroque season.

    While teas like this one consecrate the cup as the theatre of the sublime, they remind us that in these lands it is not easy to emerge, that creative flair and freedom of expression are not common or taken for granted and that spring, despite its splendor, cannot erase the bitter aftertaste of this eternal struggle.

    The sip has a good thickness, with an almost watery sweetness typical of melon that supports the weave of elderflower and orange blossom syrup, thickening in the aromas of taro mochi and acacia honey. It proves to be a vertical tea, ascending in its tension between freshness and maturity, it shows to be a path to follow, a turning point by placing a door in front of the past that must never be reopened.

    In the past decades Darjeeling has been like a vagabond in the world, a terroir of extraordinary complexity and a potential only minimally explored, but it is as if the truth has continually escaped. But now tea and producers like these are establishing a new route, a new pact with their land, a hymn to the highest genius, to the craziest tea, refuge of perpetual change.

  • When a great pu’er become an elegy. Eastern Leaves Lunan Mountain ancient trees 2020

    When a great pu’er become an elegy. Eastern Leaves Lunan Mountain ancient trees 2020

    For generations, caravans laden with pu’er have traversed the steep paths of Lunan, eluding the harsh karst landscape, leaving it behind them, slowly advancing towards Tibet.

    The muleteers, with their faces hollowed by frost and fatigue, relied on themselves, on their companions, on the tenacity of their horses, following the paths traced by their ancestors, where every bend concealed stories of exchange, trade and survival.

    Pasha seems to have been able to overcome everything, from the destruction that occurred with the Panthay rebellion to the wreck of traditionalism and the collectivization of the Cultural Revolution, to the persecution of the Red Guards.

    Hölderlin wrote “where there is danger, what saves also grows,” and so it is here that natural beauty and spiritual aspirations intertwine into a rich and vibrant cultural cloth, and teas like this, with their dense depth of flavors of vanilla, candied fruit, nuts and persimmons, take us into a dimension of time that we cannot easily grasp, a place where tradition is not only preserved, but continually recreated.

    With its silky sip, honeyed sweetness, musky and citrus tones, the cup becomes a sort of refuge, a bridge rather than an end.

    When we sip a cup of pu’er like this we are entering into a dialogue with the past, it reminds us that not all is lost, that in its slow and patient aging lies both a concession and a resistance to time.

    A great pu’er becomes an elegy, not only a lyric of sadness for what is lost but a celebration of the intrinsic value of what has been. In its leaves pervaded by scents of red dates, walnuts and toasted pumpkin seeds, of withered broom flowers, its elegiac essence revived through a call to the earth, to history, to the culture, every sip becomes an existential plan, a way of inhabiting time with consciousness.

    It offers us a key to a further, more saturated dimension of time, in which loss is not an obstacle to overcome but nourishment for our being. Both, the elegy and the pu’er make memory a cure, an antidote to oblivion, reminding us that the past is not a wound to be closed, but a legacy to draw from.

  • An Antidote to Boredom. Seven Essence Darjeeling Ennui

    An Antidote to Boredom. Seven Essence Darjeeling Ennui

    Ennui, boredom, the name of this tea, the strange sensation that overwhelms you when nothing happens, when everything forces you to remain still, like an old wreck of a bus stopped in the middle of nowhere, and you there, with an empty gaze, with a half-extinguished cigarette between your fingers, without knowing where you will go or what you will do. Boredom is the slow rain that beats on the windshield while you wait for a level crossing to close, waiting for a train that will never pass.

    It is with you wherever you go, like an old battered suitcase that you can’t forget anywhere. According to Heidegger and Schopenhauer, boredom is a sign of a more significant absence, that of an authentic connection with reality, the feeling associated with the unsatisfiability of worldly things. But boredom can be seen as a crisis of meaning, which opens up new possibilities of existence, it makes you feel as if time is a trap, a kind of dead end, but things like culture, rituals and traditions provide an antidote through their ability to live time and experience through values that transcend the individual.

    Teas like Ennui are authentic expressions of civilization, they not only entertain but give shape to a moment. They are those true teas, shaped by high altitudes, by the hard, merciless soil, those peaks that teach you freedom and coexistence with emptiness.

    Its leaves enclose that sense of limit, of transcendence, where boredom has no space. Between the notes of chestnut honey, peach and turmeric, accords of tuberose and Bulgarian rose, jasmine and ylang ylang make their way, accompanied by the scents of birch wood and face powder as in an overlapping of works by Rachael McCampbell exhibited in an old venetian coquetry.

    And if the antidote to boredom is culture and tradition, tea, from this perspective, is a sort of Aristotelian mimesis: it imitates and returns, in the form of a sensitive experience, the nature and culture of the place from which it comes. And so in its soft and sweet sip, aromas of grapes, moss, spices and rose weave the memory of a glass of moscato passito in the middle of summer, consecrating a tea of incredible persistence.

  • Tea as a contrast to immediacy and as an aid to living time. Viet Sun Thương Sơn sheng pu’er 2016

    Tea as a contrast to immediacy and as an aid to living time. Viet Sun Thương Sơn sheng pu’er 2016

    I think there is immense value in dwelling on the traditions that tie us to the past. We live in an age that has forgotten the importance of living time, of the slow maturation of ideas and things. Rather than living, we grope in a era that tends at times to reduce life to mere mechanisms of action and compensation, to power relations, to a set of derivations and summary assumptions. And yet, our daily experience recalls something much deeper: the desire for meaning, the search for truth, the will to give meaning to time and to recognize the sacred.

    This morning I reached back into my pharmacy, getting a 2016 sheng cake out of that mess, it comes from Thương Sơn, one of those places where the past intertwines with a vibrant and complex present, which seems to hold the secret to eternity. Here, ethnic and cultural plurality merge into a living mosaic, the rice paddies wrap the mountains like an emerald scarf, contrasted by the pink-purple waves of autumn buckwheat flowers, those flowers that are said to have been sent by the gods as a sign of recognition.


    Each leaf is a fragment of a narrative that has developed over centuries, Thương Sơn is rich in ancient trees that produce teas like this, whose aromas recall the cold winter with the spirit of an austere old father wrapped in his leather armchair, immersed in the cloud of an evening cigar.

    The sip is enveloping, deep, mineral with hints of Montecristo cigar, leather, dried Moroccan plum, camphor and cloves, it is a constant reminder that true pleasure requires patience. The aromas then sublimate into a dimension of labdanum accords, apricot in alcohol, gentian liqueur and incense. The intense huigan and strong qi revive the image of the crazy and primordial harmony of places like this, so typical of traditional places, a cup we could define as an “accumulated wisdom”.

    Teas like these, places like Thương Sơn, through understanding the bond with their own tradition, with their own history, teach that there is an order, a truth that transcends human contingency, and a tea like this that ages is a trace of that truth, a witness, a collector of past eras, a contract between generations.

  • A mystical, primordial village that gave refuge to outlaws, tea merchants, heroic loggers and ghosts. Huang Cao Ba told with a 2023 old trees sheng pu’er

    A mystical, primordial village that gave refuge to outlaws, tea merchants, heroic loggers and ghosts. Huang Cao Ba told with a 2023 old trees sheng pu’er

    Huang Cao Ba is a village of less than 800 souls, a respectable number considering the average of the nearby ones. Although it lives on a simple economy, based mostly on the production of food to be consumed on site, on livestock and agriculture, it can boast a certain basic well-being and the historical prestige of having a thousand-year history of tea production, with most of the relatively contiguous gardens planted in the middle and late Qing dynasty (1636-1912).

    The red and yellow dirt roads on which Huang Cao Ba based much of his social life were the edges of a wild peak in whose forests the boys dreamed of being explorers and daredevils. You could smell the rice paddies that overwhelms you like an army of silk bundles, you could smell the mud, the green bamboo swaying in the wind broken by the spring rainstorm and every kind of subtropical exhalation.

    Before those houses built with stone and clay bricks with sloping tin roofs, there was a traffic of information and documents, exchange of words and silences in that village which was a post station during the Nanzhao reign on the “刊木古道” the ancient timber cutting road which was a significant link for the foreign and military policy, the culture and the economy of the reign, which ran from Dali through Jingdong, Zhenyuan, Jinggu to Pu’er.

    The vegetation consists of evergreen mountain broadleaf and mixed coniferous forests covering the centuries-old tea trees, so dense that the first exploration team was sent from Jinggu County only in 2001. Even its name derives from the cultural ethnocentrism of the first men, who, unable to penetrate it with the same ease they encountered in other villages, hastily dismissed it with what they could see from afar, as the land of yellow grass.

    A mystical, primordial village that gave refuge to outlaws and fugitives during the Tang and Ming dynasties, a village of Yi healers and shamans and tea merchants on the Tea Horse Road, heroic loggers and ghosts of fallen workers, It is from its old trees that the leaves of this TdC 2023 sheng come. The leaves are wrapped in scents of peach jelly, cut grass and rock sugar, mango sherbet and orchid.

    In the mouth it is delicately soft, translating the wild genesis of the slopes from which it comes, incredibly sweet and persuasive in the aromas of candied fruit, hibiscus, ripe apricot, then hints of walnut, vanilla and citrus peel finish a sip of excellent persistence.

  • A “cante jondo” between emotions and rationality. Seven Essence FF Darjeeling “Duende”

    A “cante jondo” between emotions and rationality. Seven Essence FF Darjeeling “Duende”

    Duende is the name of this tea, that duende which is a place ex-nihilo where there is no map or exercise, principle of creation, of generative power, it’s the mental dress worn by the restless, of those who renounce deep sleep by remaining in the temporal foil between the traveled path and the dreamed, of those who are willing to put aside the smile to travel the streets of disquietude.

    Through this tea in its scents of mango, green melon, among the nuances of cut grass, of late summer rain, Darjeeling rediscovers itself in a new, unique form. There are those who said that this land would not granted anything more than what has already been seen, but there are those who among the mists understood the spirit of time, who become the interpreter of that restlessness, that fertile suffering that fuses the forms, which is the matrix of the extraordinary.

    In its tones of roots, bergamot leaf, suede, pumpkin seeds and cocoa butter it translates into liquid that power of primordial vigor, of a subterranean force that destabilizes habit and consecrates itself in the new. “The arrival of the duende always presupposes a radical change of every form with respect to old plans, it gives sensations of freshness that are completely new” and it’s then that are revealed the faces of men and women who support the weight of the uncertainty, in which are configured the struggle of contrasts, the incongruence of thoughts, the refusal of the safe learned geometries to pursue the discovery of tacit truths.

    In the mouth it’s soft, buttery, contrasted by a Champagne citrus freshness, the steam brings to mind that morning breeze of Reims before the harvest, surrounded by earthy and humid aromas. They become the foundation of a deep melody of perfumes, a “cante jondo” between emotions and rationality, between ancient ports and new routes.

    But it must be tried, there is no way to explain leaves like those of Duende without resorting to a paradoxical language, because their taste, their tactile descending path towards the throat and directed to the soul cannot be adequately articulated by tired descriptors and words, but must be grasped in its sensitive experience