Category: Articles

Critique of Darjeeling Reason, or Why Reducing Darjeeling Black Teas to “Muscatel” Is a Recipe for Disaster

We have all heard it at least once: that Darjeeling black teas, the second flushes, taste like muscatel. To some it may seem a trivial matter, but for me reading it for the umpteenth time is torture, a subtle form of violence, like being tied to a bed and forced to listen over and over again to a lullaby sung by that unbearably grating voice of Liam Gallagher. Muscatel has become not a descriptor but a credential, a badge meant to pre-empt further inquiry.

Over the past decades, this obsession with muscatel has degenerated badly, taking on the shape of every late-capitalist fetish: ultra-categorization, linguistic anesthesia, the aesthetics of pseudo-scarcity, and the misappropriation of other people’s labor (where those who break their backs always earn next to nothing, in short). Premium harvests, super-premium, super rare, Imperial this or Royal that, Maharaja, special series, gold, silver… entering 80% of the online shops that sell Darjeeling is like being completely drunk, crashing your car through the window of a bar, and then asking where they’ve hidden the gas pump. It’s chaos wrapped in floral notes and, obviously, muscatel.

While the price of what is arguably the most “muscatel-like” oolong on Earth, the Dongfang Meiren (Oriental Beauty), was skyrocketing in Taiwan, and countries like Japan were demanding more and more teas with this profile, various Thai and Vietnamese players were putting their own substitutes on the market, with results that were sometimes surprising and at other times depressing. The difference is that, in those teas, muscatel aroma became an icon of ambiguity, whereas in Darjeeling people rushed headlong into it with kamikaze enthusiasm, to the point that this single aromatic note became the identity card of the entire terroir. No narrative was needed: all that mattered was printing the estate name in huge letters, saying it tasted of muscatel, and to hell with everything else.

Some time ago I had a discussion about this with two old friends at L.’s house, on one of those days when the air feels heavier, slower, saturated with humidity, the kind of day when you feel the urge to attack something immediately just to distract yourself from the terribly depressing climate trying to crush your mental health. L. is not a lover of Darjeeling teas, let’s be clear. She mostly drinks Tieguanyin, Yancha, and Dancong. Or rather, she had never really been interested in Darjeeling, had never felt the call to walk down the nave and reach the land of lightning. To her they were indecipherable; she simply didn’t feel like buying them, dismissing them as “all the same.” Brutal, but how can you blame her if you read “muscatel” everywhere? It’s as if there were a sort of olfactory socialism, an aromatic Marxism. At some point, their supposed crown jewel, the muscatel note, turned into a leveling policy, an ontological sponge through which no tea is allowed to stand out for its diversity. And the 200 appellations used in a schizophrenic way do nothing to help, further complicating a broth into which everything has now been thrown to please everyone. L. found them oppressively repetitive and excessively, self-consciously “colonial” in their communication. Who would spend €0.50-1+ per gram on teas you don’t even know where to begin distinguishing, drowned in lexical accumulation and burdened by a long struggle to recover from counterfeiting? To be clear, origin falsification happens everywhere tea is produced, but here the media, local ones included, have shown no restraint in piling on, placing a blood-drained territory under the spotlight with macabre, necrophiliac delight.

But back to the point: the problem is not muscatel itself. Muscatel has the same innocence jazz once had before becoming the soundtrack of elevators and three quarters of Christmas movies. L. told me she had last tried a Darjeeling ten years ago. The experience reminded her of her first time returning home after university, to her stale bedroom that smelled of being shut in and of puberty, with the blinds left in exactly the same position and the same wallpaper, only half detached and yellowed.

This is because only in recent years Darjeeling has begun to stop being a historical museum, a sarcophagus of the status quo, although resistance remains. Sellers still peddle stuff on the verge of turning to dust, shredded, insipid leaves, or teas dressed up with names that excite colonial nostalgics and crown enthusiasts. What I’ve never understood is this inability to distance oneself from the constant urge toward self-marginalization, and why Darjeeling has refused to stop playing a marginal role, the eternal wallflower at the dance, watching others on the floor while sitting on the chair farthest from the punch bowl, waiting for an appointment that will never come on its own.

The real problem is the renunciation of conflict. Authentic Darjeeling does not taste only of fucking muscatel. Sure, it’s there too, especially in certain cultivars and in specific seasonal windows, but reducing everything to that means deliberately amputating the rest, making people believe that Darjeeling tea tastes like nothing else. In reality, the tea from these mountains is frenetic, conflictual, full of friction, to the point that you would never believe the same leaves, processed differently, could come from the same terroir, or even the same continent.

To insist on muscatel as the defining criterion is to deny this productive volatility, to make Darjeeling safe, legible, and ultimately harmless.

The term muscatel has become a sedative that Darjeeling has been carrying around for fifty years like a bag of diazepam shot straight into the arm, endlessly.

This territory does not need to be Kyoto, where everything is ultra-described, every sign is endlessly verbose in its insistent multilingualism, where everything is clear to the point of exasperation. Darjeeling should instead show its character, like a Calcutta market at five in the morning, or a pub brawl on any Friday night in Birmingham: disordered, real, and above all done with pretending that this land begins in the White Drawing Room, with all those useless appellations.

There is an existential need to change the narrative around these teas, so that they can be described uniquely, as one would a singular work of art. We need to detox from neutral descriptions and lexical ambiguities. There is no need to re-propose a worn-out variation of the same symphony. Continuing to scrape the violin over the word “muscatel” is nothing but a preemptive retreat, a laziness that domesticates the masses. Excessive categorization has forced Darjeeling into the need to correspond to a genre, and as such it must “respond” and “fit,” rather than signify.

Moreover, the systematic exclusion of autumn teas from market discourse looks more like an intention than an oversight. Autumn is less photogenic; muscatel aromas are often muted by a desire to experiment, to create more ambiguous leaves that offer a complex, divisive, at times eccentric aromatic stratification, shaped by different growing conditions.

In this case, science ends up confirming what experience had already suggested. The famous muscatel aroma is the result of complex interactions, pedological, climatic, agronomic, altimetric, cultivar-related, and the relationships between plants and insects. This aroma appears almost as a direct consequence of the plant’s defense strategies against herbivorous insects, particularly thrips (Scirtothrips dorsalis) and jassids (Empoasca flavescens), whose activity increases during the second flush. The lesions caused by their mouthparts, rasping-sucking in thrips, piercing-sucking in jassids, activate inducible defense responses that lead to the production and release of secondary metabolites. In general, these metabolites play crucial ecological roles: they may act as toxins, feeding deterrents, reducers of plant tissue digestibility, or chemical signals that attract the natural enemies of herbivores. This principle, widespread throughout the plant kingdom, is particularly evident in tea plants. In the specific case of Darjeeling, herbivory stress induces strong up-regulation of genes involved in the biosynthesis of volatile aromatic molecules such as linalool, geraniol, nerolidol and their oxides, as well as key enzymes like lipases, alcohol dehydrogenase and glycosidases. Many of these compounds derive from precursors stored as disaccharide glycosides (β-primeverosides) which, under conditions of cellular integrity, remain separated from β-primeverosidases; membrane rupture caused by insects (and later amplified during processing) allows hydrolysis of these precursors and the release of free aromatic molecules. Among them are terpenoid compounds such as 2,6-dimethyl-3,7-octadiene-2,6-diol and 3,7-dimethyl-1,5,7-octatrien-3-ol, which specifically contribute to muscatel perception. A similar mechanism occurs in Taiwan with Empoasca onukii (Jacobiasca formosana).

Darjeeling thus represents an emblematic case of convergence between ecology and taste, where muscatel is only one expression of an extremely complex system of interdependencies, also modulated by cultivar, altitude, agronomic management, and seasonality. But what happens when there are climatic imbalances, when gardens are located at very different altitudes, when insect density decreases? These increasingly common phenomena lead to teas that are radically different and inherently unpredictable from year to year. So why not accept this and build a new narrative structure?

This is made extremely evident by scientific analyses, which highlight how the interaction of the factors listed above allows spring and autumn harvests to accumulate higher levels of metabolites, playing a crucial role in shaping Darjeeling’s aromatic and gustatory profile. Equally important, metabolomic analyses show clearly distinct profiles between flushes (amino acids, sugars, polyphenols, organic acids), demonstrating that spring and autumn can yield high metabolite accumulation and thus cups of great finesse, complexity, and internal tension, which should prompt a reconsideration of autumn teas not as secondary expressions, but as integral to the identity of Darjeeling itself.

Choosing diversity, accepting that Darjeeling implies teas that are almost impossible to assimilate into any single category, means recognizing its very beauty, a beauty as refusal of assimilation, a beauty as measure, a beauty as resistance of an unnormalized remainder. Continuing to say that Darjeeling teas taste only of muscatel is like building a library filled with a hundred scientific studies, adding a generous amount of humanistic literature, Adorno, Camus, Scruton, Heidegger, Dostoevsky, and then setting it on fire.

Changing the narrative means reintroducing risk. It means accepting experimentation in tea processing, occasionally producing batches that are hard to sell, leaves no one has ever heard of. Until a few years ago I myself was completely ignorant of what this land has to offer. Then I discovered Darjeeling teas from non-Chinese cultivars, roasted, smoked, or with every imaginable degree of oxidation, leaves with a huigan capable of overshadowing many Chinese teas; notes of mango and green cardamom, of apricot and at the same time wax on an antique piece of furniture, of moss and buttercream and Damask rose, or freshly pressed olives alongside jasmine accords. These are aromas that seem utterly incompatible in any other context, yet here they find shelter, like the eccentricities of the most diverse people taking refuge from urban rain under the same bus stop.

Reorienting the narrative therefore means striving to describe each lot as one would an unrepeatable painting, just out of the studio and still smelling of oil-paint solvent. It means abandoning the illusory idea that quality coincides with clarity, aromatic clarity this time, not descriptive, because the most disparate and useless filo-colonial appellations will never restore lost authenticity, nor the uniqueness that teas from this terroir so desperately need to reclaim.

Bibliography:

Cho, Jeong-Yong & Mizutani, Masaharu & Shimizu, Bun-ichi & Kinoshita, Tomomi & Ogura, Miharu & Tokoro, Kazuhiko & Lin, Mu-Lien & Sakata, Kanzo. (2007). Chemical Profiling and Gene Expression Profiling during the Manufacturing Process of Taiwan Oolong Tea “Oriental Beauty”. Bioscience, biotechnology, and biochemistry. 71. 1476-86. 10.1271/bbb.60708.

De D, Hazra A, Das S. & Ray S.. (2025). Metabolomic insights into seasonal variations in Darjeeling orthodox tea: implications for quality, flavor, and nutritional profile. Journal of Food Science and Technology -Mysore-. 62. 10.1007/s13197-025-06310-2.

De D, Sarkar S, Chhetri H, Chatterjee J, Sinha N, Das S, Sarkar A, Ray S (2024) Impact of meteorological and processing factors on metabolite composition of Darjeeling tea. J Anal Sci Tech 15(1):1–19.

G, Bornali & Borchetia, Sangeeta & Bhorali, Priyadarshini & Agarwala, Niraj & Bhuyan, Lakshi & Rahman, A & Sakata, K & Mizutani, Masaharu & Shimizu, Bun-ichi & Gurusubramanian, Guruswami & Ravindranath, R & Kalita, Mohan & Hazarika, Mridul & Das, Sudripta. (2012). Understanding Darjeeling tea flavour on a molecular basis. Plant molecular biology. 78. 577-97. 10.1007/s11103-012-9887-0.

Liu, Huifan & Li, Sufen & Xiao, Gengsheng & Wang, Qin. (2021). Formation of volatiles in response to tea green leafhopper (Empoasca onukii Matsuda) herbivory in tea plants: a multi-omics study. Plant Cell Reports. 40. 10.1007/s00299-021-02674-9.

Sakata K, Mizutani M, Ahn YO, Shimizu B (2005) Floral aroma of Oolong tea are results of stress-responded reactions in tea leaves during the tea processing. In: 2005 international symposium on innovation in tea science and sustainable development in tea industry, 11–15 Nov 2005, organized by Tea research institute, Chinese academy of agricultural sciences, China tea science society and Unilever (China) Ltd., Hangzhou, China, pp 607–617.

Wang L, Di T, Peng J, Li Y, Li N, Hao X, Ding C, Huang J, Zeng J, Yang Y, Wang X (2022) Comparative metabolomic analysis reveals the involvement of catechins in adaptation mechanism to cold stress in tea plant (Camellia sinensis Var. sinensis). Env Exp Bot 201:104978.

17 December 2025
The Cup That Didn’t Need Your Approval – Viet Sun Tủa Chùa Spring 2024

We all know it: social networks always leave too much room for sensationalism. There’s endless space for anyone obsessed with sanctifying new brands and glorifying mind-blowing teas that promise an experience somewhere between spiritual awakening and a methamphetamine binge. A permanent pop-up of disposable enthusiasm. It’s the amusement park where anyone can feel like a prophet for a day, canonizing the newest square meter of the most remote village, where snakes, tigers, and giant beetles supposedly lurk ready to attack the tea pickers, only them, of course, not people practicing any other profession, before moving on without even bothering to stub out their cigarette in the ashtray of final verdicts.

Everything seems to shine, everything seems harmless, everything promises miracles, at least until you realize it was only a reflection, not the source. That’s life.

It has happened to me too: speaking too highly, too soon.
But there is one terrain, one terroir, on which I’m not willing to make the slightest concession: Tủa Chùa.

From a mountainous rear area near the Điện Biên Phủ valley, where in 1954 the decisive battle that ended French colonial rule was fought, this region has become an enclave capable of producing surprisingly accomplished Pu’er teas. Many areas once considered marginal and reactionary, such as Tủa Thàng, turned into revolutionary bases, as they combined geographic isolation with strong social cohesion. The karst plateau, with its steep mountains and paths invisible to outsiders, offered natural refuge to high-ranking officials of the Việt Minh. They took shelter in the homes of Hmong villages, protected by the population’s collective silence.

The inhabitants knew the land intimately, guiding men, weapons, and messages along unmarked routes, avoiding French patrols and keeping the mountain areas connected to the Điện Biên valley. All of this unfolded in conditions of extreme poverty, yet they provided food, places to rest, and intelligence on enemy movements, accepting extraordinarily high risks. In those mountains, silence was a form of resistance, and the geography itself seemed to have taken sides.

Now, back to the tea.

If I had to explain to someone what true mineral, botanical, ancestral excellence means, if I had to make them understand what these trees are capable of, and why Vietnam today not only looks Yunnan straight in the eye but openly challenges its borders, I wouldn’t hesitate for a second. I’d pour them this tea. No preamble, no rhetorical acrobatics, no captions.

The way this tea is evolving is sublime, truly the kind of harvest you get once every five years.

I’m sorry to say it won’t deliver the tragic depth of Marina Abramović’s gaze, the high priestess of emotional intensity descending upon us mortals to elevate us by staring into our eyes like a corneal topographer.

What it will give you is a perfect sip.

This is a sheng with an almost exasperated intensity, like an overexposed photograph that somehow works. It lingers on orchid notes, though not like Jingmai, those notes seem wrapped in a dense, almost brooding forest aroma, the kind currently fashionable to flaunt when talking about Guafengzhai, but here they feel more arrogant, they slide under your skin with a needle’s quiet, deliberate precision, an elegance that’s both unsettling and strangely pleasant.

On the palate it’s viscous, medium-bitter, with barely perceptible astringency. The huigan is quick, floral, so persistent it feels more like a reforming than a return.

This isn’t a tea for fragrance addicts or niche perfume obsessives.

The qi is the real point here.

It’s a tea for those who recognize the exact moment when something slips in and changes you.

You don’t keep drinking it just for the aroma, you do it because a part of you has already been pulled in, and now it wants to know what will happen if you keep filling the cup.

6 December 2025
Why Are We Still Pretending Darjeeling Doesn’t Matter? – Seven Essence Darjeeling Ouroboros 2025

There are several reasons why I sometimes disappear and stop writing. A loss of imagination, a lack of interesting teas, and other times it’s simply my own bad habits sabotaging every functioning neuron like a broker gambling with other people’s money. And then there are a couple of reasons no one would care about anyway.

But through all of this, I never stop reading.

Still, I never seem to read enough about Darjeeling, about what happens up there, about its teas.

I’ve always been a fanatic of the outcast and a chronic sentimentalist when it comes to shadowy corners, yet I can’t quite explain how, after twenty years of transformation, twenty years since Darjeeling was a caricature of itself, a withered tea ground into particles so fine they resembled the jaundiced, depressing version of the world’s most famous nose white powder. But now that this terroir is producing something extraordinary, even radical, it remains buried under a silence so thick it’s hard not to suspect that plenty of people prefer it that way.

I mean, at this point Darjeeling has become like one of those old guitar shops where you walk in thinking you’ll just take a quick look and end up realizing that every instrument in the room has more personality than you do.
And now they’ve even taken to crafting a flawless Yabukita, without kidnapping any Japanese makers or resorting to those “minor cultural seizures” the British used to call foreign policy when they royally screwed things up with China.

Some time ago I met an art dealer who spent his days among some of humanity’s most astonishing paintings, only to return to an apartment with exposed meters, peeling plaster, cracks running across the walls like badly healed scars, and rugs riddled with cigarette burns. It was a hole carved out in the middle of urban chaos, the kind of place he’d only been able to afford back when interest rates were frozen. But to him, it was home. His emotional bunker. The private stage for his domestic follies.

Ouroboros, this Yabukita first flush, is more or less the same thing for me. A reset button, the kind you press only when you’ve officially run out of patience.

The aroma of the wet leaves recalls the soft, dim sensuality that must have permeated the ridotti of nineteenth-century Venice, where the creaking parquet served as an unintentional soundtrack to the backstage vocal warm-ups, and the scent of stage makeup sold to actors and singers mingled with the smell of sex and the dusty, threadbare drapes.

It’s a tea processed like an oolong, a futurist tea built on juxtapositions and clashes, where notes of moss, damask rose, and face powder emerge as if a performer had just walked past you, brushing against your shoulder, not by accident but with deliberate slowness. Then mango, verbena, polished wood, and tuberose shift in tangled succession.

As the sip moves forward, the intensity rises like a cab driver who refuses to acknowledge the existence of brakes; the mango grows richer with floral shades of geranium and violet, leaving a film of sugary sweetness on the palate and an obstinately long aromatic persistence.

It’s a tea that grabs you by the collar and drags you right back to the exact point where you stopped feeling alive, but with a new perspective.

1 December 2025
Shāqīng: My New EBook Is Out Now (English & Italian)

Hello everyone!

With this post, I would like to share the result of a project that has accompanied me over the past few months: a publication born from the desire to present, in an ordered and comprehensible form, the most significant insights I have gathered about the world of fermented teas.

More than a year ago, I began collecting material for a book that would include a wide range of information concerning the engineering, microbiology, and biochemistry of fermented teas. Given the complexity of the project, and unsure whether it would ever see the light of day, I decided to publish a preview dedicated exclusively to shaqing.

There are not many publications capable of addressing tea processing with clarity and rigor; even fewer do so in a way that is accessible and free from economic barriers. This work attempts, at least in part, to fill that gap by offering a starting point for understanding the complexity of production processes, particularly those of Pu’er and fermented teas.

I have always believed that knowledge, to be genuine, must be offered without ostentation; that it should serve as a space for connection rather than exclusion. For this reason, I wanted this excerpt to be freely available.

It is a gesture of gratitude toward those who have stood by me, toward those who are no longer with us, toward all who have contributed to the creation of this work, and naturally toward tea itself and the people whom, thanks to it, I have been fortunate enough to meet.

If you choose to read it, I hope you will find within these pages not only information, but also a measure of the care and passion I have tried to pour into them, and that you may feel inspired to share it with as many people as possible.

In the end, as often happens with traditions that endure, what truly matters is not merely knowledge itself, but the community that forms around it.

Below you will find the downloadable file, available in both Italian and English.

Cheers, my friends, and happy reading!

Kevin Vitale – Shaqing Principles ENGLISH

Kevin Vitale – Shaqing Principi ITALIANO

21 November 2025
On How Hard It Is to Make a Good Black Tea – Sipping Viet Sun’s Lào Cai Deep Forest Black Spring 2025

I sometimes think we take far too much for granted just how complicated it is to make a truly good tea, especially a good black tea.
It’s treated as a Pavlovian reflex, a gesture made without thought, like pouring yourself another glass of prosecco when the guests’ conversation has already descended into collective complaint.

We grow used to the idea of that same black tea we’ve known since childhood, the one we dip into hot water, pressing it against the bottom of the cup with a spoon as though drowning an enemy soldier, then lifting it out in an act of sheer mercy, waiting for answers that will never come.
But how difficult is it, really, to make a tea that isn’t just another instrument of urban survival, like the burnt acid coffee of a NOLA diner where Truman Capote used to sleep off his drunk?

Crafting an excellent black tea can be a perilous act, a poorly calculated risk, a climatic roulette.
The best terroirs, in Yunnan, Vietnam, and Thailand, where the best Dianhong and wild black teas are born, are surreal, high-mountain subtropical zones with humidity often above 80% and violent diurnal temperature shifts.
Many varieties from these regions, particularly the wild non-sinensis sinensis types, bear large, waxy leaves with thicker cell walls requiring greater mechanical force to rupture.
And in cold, damp environments such as Lào Cai, leaf plasticity itself changes with temperature, creating irregular breaks that result in uneven oxidation.

During withering and oxidation, intracellular water regulates enzymatic kinetics and oxygen diffusion; therefore, the microstructure of the leaf, guided by the degree of mechanical rolling and the residual moisture content, controls the access of O₂ to phenolic substrates. In large, thick-cuticle leaves, diffusion is limited, and mechanical rolling, by potentially breaking cells unevenly, can create micro-anoxic zones that produce grassy notes alongside over-oxidized regions responsible for bitter flavors.

To make matters worse, these varieties exhibit a polyphenol oxidase activity significantly higher than that of sinensis sinensis cultivars, sometimes two to three times greater.
This causes a much faster initial rate of oxidation and a greater release of heat, since these reactions are strongly exothermic.
The result is a local rise in temperature within the leaf pile and extreme sensitivity to even the slightest thermal or oxygen fluctuations.
A gradient of merely ±5 °C between surface and core can produce differences of 20–30% in the local oxidation rate, turning the process into a blind sprint toward excess.

The pronounced diurnal temperature range triggers metabolic oscillations, leading to unstable enzymatic activity. Add to that the high humidity and the coincidence of the rainy season during harvest and processing, and the withering can drag on for hours and hours. Moreover, even the final natural drying can prove impossible and storage can turn into a logistical nightmare.
All this leads to the constant risk of unwanted chromatic heterogeneity, partial over-oxidation, and distorted aromatic profiles, dominated by earthy and metallic tones, mouthfeel stripped of viscosity, and a finish that is absent, unpleasantly vegetal-oxidized, laced with the taste of missed opportunity and lost money.

And yet, this Lào Cai Deep Forest 2025 by Viet Sun tells another story.
Its wet leaves smell of a kind of wildness that would even coax a smile from Eduardo Kohn, of forest berries, amber, and guava.
The olfactory profile deepens through the corroded cortex of a nostalgic old Tory: leather and forgotten colonial furniture, oak aged Pedro Ximénez, and the memory of a wilted rose.

On the palate, it is soft, seductive, with a sugarcane sweetness and flavors of wild berries, dried flowers, and dehydrated cherry.
It’s a difficult tea, one whose making requires traversing a desert of problems, an act of resistance against mechanization itself.
But perhaps that is the price to pay for something potentially extraordinary.

Kerouac once wrote that “problems are the general definition of the things in which God exists.”
And here, God is probably caked with mud, smokes Saigon Red, and occasionally takes refuge in the hands of those who still believe in difficulty.

12 November 2025
After the Metaphors – Viet Sun Cao Bồ Tall Trees Spring 2025

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.

29 October 2025
Dark Alleys, Bright Lies. Seven Essence Spring 2025 Darjeeling Petrichor

You never thought you’d find yourself at this hour of the morning in a place like this, and you wish you could appear to yourself less out of place than you actually are. You got there after immense vestibular struggles, tearing your jacket at the shoulder that had christened the walls of the whole 3rd Avenue, walls that were essential for you to keep an upright stance, while thinking about what it would be like to sit with your nose pressed against the condensation on the window, as outside the city swarmed in the intricate anthill of the metropolis’s underground.

The hours slip away like scraps of time in the incessant rain, the night overcomes the inertia of time, and in that instant two o’clock turns implacably into five. The smell of water on asphalt enters through the door, filling your lungs. Within those four walls, where people seem intent on parading the abandonment of beauty as an ideal, human matter appears left in its larval, suffering state. And yet you decide, finally, to chase the storm. You leave that refuge of castoffs with cautious agility, pushing past the wreckage of bodies. The merciless daylight has not yet pierced you, but you sense that, if you dare to lift your gaze, you would discover the kind of sky Buñuel would have loved to film: bare, raw, condemning.

The scent of petrichor comes as a diagnosis, a primordial odor of drowned cities and funerals. You fancy yourself a walk-on in Mastroianni’s La Dolce Vita, except there is no Anita Ekberg to redeem you, only empty taxis, memories soured by undigested alcohol, no vintage Italian cars, only graffiti, puddles shimmering metallic green, and a man clutching a handrail like Christ in Grünewald’s Crucifixion.

And this Seven Essence tea, a 2025 Darjeeling first flush, is a confession of hidden memory, an echo from your compromised hippocampus able to grant grace even to one of these formless nights. It recalls the mineral scent of rock, buildings washed by a midsummer tropical rain, the dark humid nights spent cradling a glass; it carries that note of cake and caramelized fruit reminiscent of your mother’s tarte tatin at six in the morning, when you returned home sheepishly, with many good intentions and little balance. In this situation, the P312 cultivar seems to proclaim with satisfaction that nature manages to create grand works without pomp or excess. In its tones of aged wood and oat hay, echoes of moss and jasmine rise, preparing you for a perfect sip. one of those that seem to set things right, becoming a medical prescription for your attempt at redemption.

This tea is a window onto the beyond, a buttery tincture, sweet and herbaceous, the liquefaction of a Salgado photograph with its exasperated structure. The sip is lushly viscous, the sweetness on the finish borders on obsessive, its complexity remarkable, and the persistence so strong that it makes you forget your last dinner in a seedy diner. But now that note of petrichor offers a way out of the city you had once chosen as the stage for your aspirations, a bandage on the broken promise of art that was meant to illuminate mankind, but which to your eyes now seems reduced to rancid ketchup and congealed mayonnaise.

26 September 2025
Bought It for the Feed. Paid for the Myth?

When a person starts consuming a lot of tea, and at the same time begins spending significant amounts of money, creating those situations where every online purchase takes on, in their mind, the aura of a bid at Christie’s for a Rubens painting, sooner or later, the people around them will pose the classic question:
“That 20-year-old tea, aged, stale, with a questionable aroma to many, costing $3 per gram, is it really worth that much?”

As I wrote in a previous article, we are all touched by the rough hand of “the psychopolitics of consumption.” Whether we like to admit it or not, price becomes a revealer of a kind of pseudo-truth, colonizing our sensations and emotions to the point that we start believing that the object bearing that price tag is somehow from a higher reality, a vehicle of a superior sensory condition.

In recent years, I’ve noticed a certain invasion of the market by cakes from producers like Xi Zi Hao, Bao Hong Yin Ji, Chen Yuan Hao, and all these boutique brands you’ll see featured in at least two or three posts a day on your Instagram feed. These aren’t brands that appeared yesterday, to be clear, but lately there seems to be a kind of viral obsession around them, adorned with a certain propensity for sensationalism.

During a tea session I attended a few days ago, many people expressed an almost frantic desire to purchase cakes from these brands, like Bingdao and Bohetang from these brands, which often sell for at least $1,500-2,000 per cake. The central discussions weren’t about their quality, but rather about how to access them: where to find the best deals, how to split the tea, as if divvying up the pages of a first edition King James Bible. At a certain point, that room full of tense faces had turned into a kind of collective purgatory, where everyone was trying to convince themselves they had enough credit to justify the expense and finally ascend. In that moment, we all could’ve been perfect subjects for an Eve Arnold photo series titled Misery and Desperation.

Now, setting aside this acute exposure syndrome toward certain brands, many were convinced that these teas would be a kind of revelation, finally pulling back the curtain on some mystical conspiracy, offering access to the long-hidden “truth of gushu”. These Pu’er teas are expected to be two or three times better than anything previously experienced, but at ten times the price. Throw in some old Red and Green Mark cakes, and you can add another zero to the figure.

So, is it really worth it? Judging by this ratio, apparently not. But if we followed this logic consistently, we’d never do anything but embalm ourselves while waiting for the final sunset.

So my answer would be: it depends on your income. If you’re not wealthy, live in a place where inflation is sky-high, and the price of a cake equals a month’s salary, then maybe you should think twice. For that same amount, I could buy an 1800s ceramic piece, plan a vacation, purchase an incredibly satisfying tea, and get my girlfriend a gift, all at once. The point is: while there are plenty of mediocre teas out there, there are also vendors offering both aged and fresh teas at human prices with truly excellent quality. A lot has changed in the past 10 years.

Why do I say this? Because over the past decade, I’ve simply come to understand that buying tea shouldn’t be a personal financial shipwreck.

It’s true that, like many other things, tea is subject to imitation behaviors. Many chase after a brand like starving wolves, simply because someone deemed “credible” for whatever reason says it’s good. The risk of confusing what we genuinely desire with what we’re unconsciously pressured to desire is always lurking, especially in an era where desires are not allowed to settle, to decant, to shed the tension of ownership imposed by a third party. A hobby always risks becoming a vice, a dependency. But tea doesn’t have to be that. We need a lateral approach, not in opposition to the market logic, but in deconstructing it and using it more consciously.

Mixing a bit of Baudrillard with a touch of Byung-Chul Han, we get an answer to this exhausted system of tasting, not of tea, but of signs. By always chasing the newest tea, the most expensive one, the one from the most remote and romantic village, fueling our hunger for the “authentic taste”, we risk entering into the realm of simulation, where the experience isn’t real but positional. One drinks something not for the experience itself, but to feel like someone in comparison to others, to position ourselves next to those who told us this tea would open our minds. Only to eventually realize, of course, that it’s just tea. Most of the time, it will always just be tea, excellent, magnificent even, but no price or opinion will dictate how much it will truly move you, or how good or special you’ll find it.

With time, you might discover that the most special, moving teas, you won’t even remember how much you paid for them. But your spouse will remember that -$2,700 transaction on June 10, 2013, for 357 grams of an obsession even you can’t explain. They’ll remember it better than your wedding anniversary, regardless of how wealthy you are. In that moment, You, Me and Dupree starts to seem like an overly optimistic romantic comedy compared to your personal film: You, Me, and a 2006 Yang Qing Hao Chawangshu, a title too long for Netflix, and too depressing to laugh at, accompanied by the muffled sound of the kettle and the silent judgment of someone who loves you despite everything. DESPITE everything.

On top of that, there’s a mechanism I find frankly perverse. Maybe it exists, maybe it’s just a product of my twisted, overly analytical mind, fueled by neurotic narcissists and the wrong reads, but it might be interesting to consider what Zygmunt Bauman described as planned obsolescence. According to this concept, a prepackaged emotional state is created, leading to affirmations like:
“This tea will be the one.”
“This time I’ll understand.”
“This time I’ll be worthy of grasping ancient tree Pu’er.”
“This time… this time…” and so on.

This generates a renewable insecurity, where every piece of information, every certainty, has an expiry date. You feel the need to try an endless number of ultra-expensive teas, each one meant to construct a kind of symbolic refuge. It’s a sneaky and refined mechanism, if you think about it. It creates a form of outsourced desire, where you move from wanting to know to desperately seeking new stimuli and confirmations, eventually imposing upon yourself the need to desire, becoming a co-author of your own subjugation.

You’re not forced to want the $2,000 tea. You convince yourself that it’s your mission, because you need to feed that pit bull that is your craving for apparent knowledge.

Of course, this doesn’t apply to everyone, but I think it helps explain many of the neuroses people have in the tea world, especially at the beginning, and particularly when they don’t have a lot of money to spend.

I’ve tried many of those teas over the years. Some were excellent and are now gone forever, many I don’t even remember drinking, and others are still there, parked like a lover in the usual hotel room, who’ll never see you walk in again. That’s because, more often than not, I end up choosing something comforting and far less expensive, something that doesn’t require a transcendent atmosphere to enjoy a dozen infusions. Something that, for many reasons, some even objective, I enjoy more.

I don’t think I’ve reached that “ethics of conscious consumption” Bauman might have described, but I’ve simply chosen to be happy drinking great tea without going broke. I’ve discovered there is no upstairs level of happiness hidden behind those cakes. Their Qi is not an LSD trip, their huigan won’t unlock some little door to enlightenment, like a Mulholland Drive sequence where everything suddenly makes sense and terrifies you, and their great health benefits won’t cure your diabetes.

For some, seeing one of those ultra-fancy cakes resting on an expensive rosewood table is akin to a primal carnivorous urge, like spotting a wounded animal lying on the ground. But I think I’ve become disenchanted with that kind of thing, I’ve, shall we say, gone vegan.

These days, I find much more pleasure in discovering unknown names, new vendors, trying teas from new regions and countries, things without pedigree but with substance, without external contamination, without info sheets or anything that triggers my annoying jaw tic that accompanies every sip of a $50/session tea.

Maybe that’s what marks the transition from novice to some kind of post-adolescent maturity in tea drinking. Or maybe it’s just the prelude to the collapse of my mental health, and soon I’ll be sipping mallow infusions in the grip of some hormone-fueled delirium. But I’ve found that this approach lets me evaluate teas more freely, more objectively, and in many ways, even more scientifically.
And above all: it’s made me happier.

6 August 2025
Notes from the Wrong Side of the Province: A Few Words on Jinggu, an Old Tea Merchant, and Two High-Mountain Pu’er.

If you ask many people what their favorite production area is, they’ll probably start listing off famous terroirs, Bingdao for its body, Laobanzhang for its qi, Naka for its fragrance, and some remote shack in a forgotten Yiwu village, which never hurts to name-drop. In short, a litany of names, as if it were a medical prescription for some trivial pathology to be handled with grave care. Or perhaps just another way to show how worn out the magnetic stripe on their credit card has become.

Jinggu likely won’t even cross their lips, not even by accident. This area is surrounded by mountains on three sides, an enclave where the best gardens are often inaccessible, and where the obsession with naming every single rooftop (as in Yiwu) is quickly anesthetized by a lack of roads and the even greater lack of desire to build them. Here, not even the clunky two-ton electric behemoths at the service of Western merchants can climb their way up.

I agree that vast expanses of flat land, dull stretches of agricultural functionality, are today brutally carpeted with Da Bai Cha, as in the flatlands of Wen Shan Ding. A cultivar that acts like a funerary carpet, its tea merely a collateral damage, a distillate of hardship and credit requests, with a hint of bank loan in the aftertaste. But if you start climbing and forget all that, you’ll reach over 2,000 meters at Kuzhu Shan. There, ancient trees stretch in swathes; in some spots, they’re even Teng Tiao, like in Banuo, but with a slightly different aromatic profile, less delicate, more fragrant, impactful, and mineral. Less mannered, and more Felliniesque, to put it simply.

Some time ago, I met a Pu’er expert, a merchant from Lincang whose main business revolved around the Fangcun market. I asked him why he thought people considered teas from Jinggu less worthy, almost like children of a lesser god, tolerated but avoided, like the uncle with a drinking problem at Christmas dinner. He was a big man, with hands the size of shovels. He stared at me for a moment, with his huge, isochoric pupils, maybe the largest I’ve seen on someone from Yunnan, wide like those of an Australian owl photographed by Joel Sartore, performing tiny mechanical micro-adjustments every time you locked eyes with him, as if missing an autofocus. He answered in monosyllables, he looked like someone who read Anna Karenina just to root for Vronsky. He smiled too, but it seemed like his facial muscles were slightly jammed from decades of monsoon rains. And yet, he was one of the most knowledgeable people on Pu’er I’ve met.

It took him a while, then he said something, I don’t quite remember what. I was too busy noticing the irrelevant details I’d later include in this article. But the meaning behind his cocktail of anthropology and Moutai was clear: Jinggu was guilty of not being immediate enough. Too real, too unavailable. Add to that the fact that the era when people chased uniqueness has been over for a couple of decades. They discovered the villages of Yiwu, Laobanzhang, Bingdao, a few others in between, and the punch bowl quickly ran dry. Because, you see, he said, the markets want exclusivity. The consumers who arrive in polished shoes at the edge of the forest, who slip on plastic sandals before posing in front of an ancient tree, are looking for tea like they’re looking for sushi in Berlin.

And he was right. Some want only the illusion of a mysterious narrative, not the truth of the land. They prefer a tea that behaves like a cool, aloof actor, properly trained to play the silent type, the tormented one, the aged-in-a-hut-with-a-hidden-past role, rather than someone, or something, that simply tastes like what it is.

Jinggu teas aren’t for complexity maniacs. They’re rather blunt, direct, break through your guard with a few solid punches, enveloping you in sweetness and asserting themselves through their huigan and bodily sensation.

In the Kuzhu and Tang Fang Liang Zi areas, you’ll find real forest coverage where tea is harvested, like some portion of Yiwu, the northwestern edges of Laos and Vietnam, or the forested zones of Guogan in Myanmar. Here, the trees grow close to and inside the forest. The soil is clay-based with a good amount of rock, confirming the tea’s mineral and sweet character. The plants are spaced well apart, and younger trees are left to grow naturally. You won’t see any drastic pruning, only containment cuts.

It’s a complex terroir. In one cup, you’ll think you’ve stumbled into Jingmai. Drive twenty kilometers and drink again, you might swear you’re tasting Yiwu. Walk another ten, parched and hopeful, and you’ll find bitter cultivars whose huigan is so forceful, so magnetic, it makes some Bulang teas feel like passive-aggressive outbursts by comparison.

Here, like in Laoman’e, bitter and sweet varietals sometimes coexist in the same natural amphitheater. The former, known as kucha, often dominates the more remote slopes, but it’s never overwhelmingly bitter, never out of place or chaotic. It soon turns its cheek to a wild sweetness, like a fist on the table that prepares the caress. If the sweet variety is a well-composed, harmonic melody, the bitter one is drama and catharsis, leaving every door open for further development. These are teas that, even years later, remain an enigma. Tasting them again over time is like revisiting a neighborhood in daylight where you partied in the night before. You barely recognize it, and the sunlight seems to restore a grace you previously failed to notice.

In both cases, what stands out is an oily, umami-like sip and a genuine, full-bodied chaqi, it feels like it thins your tissues, filling your chest and pushing every muscle fiber up against your skin. A tea with a soul that doesn’t scream, but also doesn’t compromise. A tea you don’t expect, and which, especially in the case of ancient trees, hasn’t been tamed to soften its impact.

Southwest of Jinggu Town lies Jiu Tai Po, one of the most expensive and coveted areas, graced with the elegance of something that knows how to stay hidden. Few signs, no selfie points, no desire to be disturbed more than necessary. The village itself, small and vaguely adrift in agricultural amniotism, has little tea directly surrounding it; most of it is in the forest zone, along the ridges or on the opposite slopes. Road access is practically nonexistent, and like Guafengzhai, it takes hours of hiking to reach the tea trees. These aren’t roads for people in Italian leather shoes, and a camo cap won’t get you to the top. The landscape feels like a James Cameron set, shot with Kubrick’s cinematography and directed by a mood-swinging park ranger. There, the leaves aren’t picked by good boys, but by madmen, neurotics howling at the moon, yelling into the western wind, and probably monks armed with faith and an unearthly amount of patience. Climbing up there feels like trying to earn a glance from Maria Callas, flailing pathetically to grasp the corner of her eye, she ignores you, and you thank her anyway.

In recent years, Jinggu has had its big moments, times when even the cynics had to admit that yes, even from those mountains often relegated to Act Two of the Pu’er narrative, something remarkable could emerge. Like the Pu’er from Tang Fang Liang Zi by Farmer Leaf, especially the single tree series that reads like an elegant lithograph set by De Chirico; the 2017 Chawangdi or the 2016 You Shang from Chawang Shop, perhaps among the Western forerunners of Jinggu’s nouvelle vague, to the 2007 Shang Pin by Xi Zi Hao or the old relics from Changtai, old-school, decadent, like an old house with silk on the walls, with the scent of leather and creaking parquet.

But today, I’ll focus on two other excellent sheng Pu’er by Thés Terre de Ciel, both from old-ancient trees.

TdC Spring 2024 Xiao Jinggu Puerh des Cimes

I’ve always had a soft spot for the Pu’er of Jinggu, for their remoteness, their distance from the inflated rhetoric about the primordial nature of its landscapes, for from the market wars over taste profiles and terroir cred. Jinggu teas owe nothing to expectation; they answer only to themselves.

This is one of those teas. The kind with no prefabricated image, no guiding archetype. Nothing to anchor your imagination, no Muse whispering interpretation in your ear, as Hesiod might have hoped. Just you and the leaf. No crib sheet. No narrative. Only the moment.

The leaves are twisted, dark green. The sip is viscous, with a round, sticky umami reminiscent of chicken broth from a market stall in Chongqing. There’s a sweetness too, unopposed and undistracted, a sensory monologue rich in subtext. The huigan lays itself across the tongue like a seamless silk blanket. Bitterness exits the discussion early.

The Qi is delicate, but it moves under your skin, subtly shifting your posture, your pace, your pulse. The salivation it provokes becomes a kind of gustatory capital. The sensation is almost organic-minimalist, like an alabaster vase with no sharp edges, revealing more intentions than it cares to admit. The intensity of the peach note approaches something like an orchestral delirium, building in a near-psychedelic crescendo, and that out-of-the-ordinary umami makes it feel less like a beverage, and more like a pre-dessert at L’Arpège.

TdC Spring 2023 Kuzhu Shan

This Pu’er from Kuzhu Shan seems like it emerged straight out of a
William Morris wallpaper, drawn after two glasses of fine Vin Jaune. Alienated, eclectic, remote, saturated with organic vitality. The dry leaves exude hints of light tropical fruit, citrus, and wildflowers. As expected, this is not a tea that lingers in a labyrinthine dimension of complexity, but that’s not the terrain where Kuzhu teas show their hand.

The true opera magna takes place in the mouth, which becomes the theater for a clash and debate between a pronounced yet agreeable bitterness and a sweetness that follows quickly, almost antithetical to it. It’s a generative tension that drives this medium-bodied sip to evolve, to layer itself, each new sensory stratum tearing apart, cannibalizing the one laid down before it.

The tasting unfolds as a kind of sensorial acceleration, like a Baz Luhrmann film, abrupt cuts, frenetic pacing, a hyperactive montage, leading to a terribly refreshing, surreal sensation with an unmistakable note of tonic water.

It’s a Gin & Tonic stripped of its damnation, as Nick Carraway might say while struggling with his addiction. This is a vividly alive liquid, whose finish is so enduring it seems pointless to measure. It unwinds slowly on notes of ginger beer, candied lemon peel, and rhubarb, while your tongue’s receptors are still stunned by the mineral lash it dealt twenty minutes earlier.

Usually, when I drink a Pu’er, I think about its aging potential, its price-to-quality ratio, I imagine derivatives and equations, risk and return curves, asking myself whether it’s better to keep it for the medium or long term. I make a lot of projections, hypotheses, even metaphysical guesses.

But the truth is, this is one of the few teas where none of that matters. I drink it because it’s simply really good. Whether it lasts twenty years or disappears in two days, for once, I really don’t care.

Left: 2023 Kuzhu Shan

Right: 2024 Xiao Jinggu

10 July 2025
Rediscovering Forgotten Ceramics: A Late Edo Imari Plate and the Survival of Beauty

For some time now, I’ve been searching for old, uncelebrated, forgotten ceramics, those hidden in the attics of memory, which for some reason have never received the appreciation they deserve. Western and Eastern ceramics alike, which could rediscover their aesthetic essence by reconfiguring their functionality, taking part in the act of the tea ceremony, even in its informal variations, finding a new stage on which to perform once more.

There is an endless variety of maiolica from Caltagirone, Faenza, Deruta, Vietri; glazed ceramics and porcelain from Capodimonte, or porcelain from Venice and Doccia, which could easily harmonize with this practice. They are not merely objects, but fragments of a forgotten discourse, crafted by visionary masters who impressed upon ceramics a certain Oriental sensibility, without ever sacrificing tradition.

I believe the same is true for many regions of the Far East take, for instance, Arita ceramics: symbols of memoryless porcelain, cupboard-bound relics, victims of that senseless Western compulsion to hang plates on walls in a misplaced pursuit of verticality. They became simulacra of the European bourgeoisie, who ravenously hunted down ‘chinoiseries’ without often asking what it was they truly held in their hands. Absurdly, those hands never truly held them at all, since the objects were bought and placed somewhere as mere installations, losing the tactility that is vital to the ceramic experience.

I have recently recovered this Imari plate, one that, by some stroke of fate, had eluded the fetishism of early orientalists and exoticism-hunters of the last century. It dates to late Edo, probably to the Bakumatsu period, when Japan was witnessing the twilight of a civilization that had reached the heights of formal refinement, just before the dawn of the Meiji era. With the easing of foreign policy tensions, Imari porcelain quickly found its way into the gilded interiors of the West, winning over the Victorian era with its chromatic flamboyance and a kind of baroque opulence.

This plate reveals the traditional essence of Arita porcelain: consistent with its era are its hard-paste composition, its floral patterns, arabesques, and phytomorphic motifs which, along with the linear strokes form the typical centripetal composition. The use of color evokes the Nabeshima style without betraying the tripartite chromatic scheme: The dominance of underglaze cobalt blue and iron red, applied in a delicate third firing, is rendered through a contracted, almost restrained brushwork, in stark contrast to the broader, more relaxed strokes usually expected.

However, unlike many later Imari pieces which, in their object-show essence, still cry out ‘I am Japan’ while whispering ‘buy me please’, this plate betrays that schematic sobriety and export-bound fate, instead offering a work that is more instinctive, more raw, and at times childlike. It does not conform to the contrived rhetoric of ‘imperfection’; rather, in my view, it unveils a kind of emotive gestural truth, which, along with the worn glaze and the makeshift repair, reanimates the idea of a fading beauty, so near to the Japanese mindset.

The West, so deeply enamored with chiaroscuro, with play of light, with order and meaning, has often overlooked more bidimensional, introverted, and seemingly naïve forms. This is a plate that ‘tells a story’, as Longhi might say, but here, it rises up, grows loud, proclaiming ‘I am the East the West never truly understood.’

Many Japanese masters of the 19th century experimented without the obsessive pursuit of serial perfection. They created without rigid boundaries, like thoughts left to mature. They stood apart from the Tokoname factory mentality, from the tyranny of repetition and the logic of hourly production.

I am convinced of its beauty, without forcibly seeking it, just as I am resolute in saying this plate is a true witness of its age, in its instinct, in its excess, it recalls the time of antique taste, having paid the price with the loss of its vitreous glaze, it has survived the consumerist years of mass-exported, mechanized works and commissioned art. This is a work that demands to be lived and explored in its materiality. And in doing so, it reconnects us to a past in which beauty could be functional, yet functionality was not a limitation. It is a survivor of artisanal vitality, erudite and refined, which, even when facing its artistic senescence, ensures that the clumsiness of its gesture does not embarrass, but rather allows a sincere and almost moving grace to emerge.

20 June 2025