Category: Articles

Discussing the contradictory essence of tea with a pu’er from the ancient land of elephants. TdC 2014 You Le Ya Nuo village sheng pu

I am of the opinion that tea, good tea I mean, should always be accompanied by a good argument. I also remain firmly convinced that it itself must partly be the reason and urge for the conversation, and partly guide it.

If we could reconstruct a sort of symposium evening I often think about which tea I would offer, and the more time passes the more I would like such a reconstruction to materialize.

Between a Yiwu pu’er who exalts himself in his expensive robe, one from Naka on the gentle banks of Mengsong in the throes of self-satisfaction and one from Laobanzhang born under the gaze of God on the happiest mountains of China, the pu’er of You Le I’m sure would find a place without resorting to excesses of violence.

Those of You Le, the ancient land of elephants, are teas with a noble soul that still retain a “bourgeois” trait, that dignified self-sufficiency which, if well channeled, results in the most refined form of intellect.

At a table tea deserves the space it’s due because some of the great events of history are poured into it, the extraordinary possibilities that humans have been granted from era to era are dissolved in it. Because tea is a trail of great epics and immense tragedies, of rhetoric, imaginative experiences and speculations, the history of entire peoples distilled into a cup.

Under the action of its metamorphic nature, tea resolves prose into verse and verse into song, calms the most abysmal dissonances without the need to silence them, rather it legitimizes and composes them.

Because from the hard ground from which its trees arise, an innocent stream of fragile ambiguity can always flow, even in the midst of that jianghu, which it foments and nourishes; between rivers and lakes it doesn’t fear contradiction and is able to make every truth “always also false” and every falsehood “always also true”.

The thoughtfulness of this spring 2014 sheng from Ya Nuo village old trees holds up its mountain’s fame. The aromas arrive with orchestral precision, opening on notes of tobacco and plum, earthy nuances, resin and musk.

The leaves recall the scents of an old library with notes of mahogany and leather armchair, then red dates, raisins and light mentholated hints. The contribution of aging is balanced, with integrated notes of leather and of an old cigar box. The sip is coherent, with good softness but with adequate agility, low bitterness, balanced and with an excellent huigan. The long aftertaste is yet another proof of a dress sewn by a great hand.

The future will give it charm even though it is a tea that does not require eternity to be appreciated, but the aspiration is more than legitimate and a decade of waiting will, in the end, be a splendid meeting.

21 August 2024
Discovering Y Tý: Comparison of two Viet Sun sheng pu’er from a Dao and a H’Mông village

A place of magnificent waterfalls, azaleas and wild peaches, the mountains background seems to give every gesture an additional majesty, a primordial dignity.
The small mud-walled houses of Y Tý stand in the green and golden colors of the rice fields, offering rural nuances to that tranquility typical of the “cloudy” land, located at more than 1700 meters above sea level. Pyramid roofs, stone fences and terraced fields are symbols of the will, minds and hands of many generations in the highlands, created to interact and converse with the nature of the mountains and rivers.

The Y Tý market meets every week and is a cultural place of exchange for Hà Nhì, H’Mông and Red Dao. Most of the stalls are run by Hà Nhì women in black and dark blue dresses, i remember the shy face of a young mother and her little girl, lying obediently in a gray jute sash on her chest. Her hair is tied back and almost glazed due to the effect of the sun on her coal black hair, the vivid gaze with her head tilted to the side as if she were listening to the voices in the wind.

Tourists are busy buying vegetables, red peanuts and Pạ Phì. The road covered in red earth dust is full of rattan baskets, worn enough to indicate actual use of their contents and well enough maintained to suggest respect for the contents themselves.

Higher up in the mountains, the landscape unravels lively between the fog, between the sandy and rocky soils of the Dao villages surrounded by the wild bamboo forest and the more clayey and fertile soils of the H’Mông villages. Those mountains that protected the soldiers on their way to the front, towards the place where the Lũng Pô creek meets the silt-tinged waters of the Hồng River, up to A Mú Sung, where they fought and fell to protect the border.

Here it is as if tea is able to fit in with culture as well as nature and can make use of both as it pleases. The landscape seems like the unconscious of the earth and the teas that derive from it are its liquid consequence.

After a more romantic first part, I will talk in a more technical and boring way about how a territory with an enormous potential now demonstrated like Vietnam can have that complexity of landscapes, that dramatic discrepancy of soil composition that is often associated with great terroirs, such as France and Italy for wine and Yunnan and Taiwan for tea.

Vietnam often is in conditions of high humidity and high temperatures during the year, such as to hypothesize a much faster maturation of the soil than, for example, northern Asia or some areas of northern Yunnan. But in the mountains many things can change, here at over 1800 meters we can have leaching, erosive, frost phenomena and extremely variable contents of the organic fraction from mountain to mountain or even in the same mountain at different elevation levels.

We can also notice typical results of the meteorological conditions of these areas, such as the deeply yellow and yellow-red color of the soil, indicative of a condition of water saturation. The soil environment is reduced and, under these conditions, the iron is reduced to the ferrous state (Fe2+), the color of the soil becomes lighter and yellower, with gleying and mottling sometimes. The iron will be in a more soluble state and therefore more available for chemical reactions.

H’Mông village has very old and tall trees growing on the slopes near the border with China, the climate here is wetter, there is more forest cover, resulting in darker green leaves than in the Dao village. This is due to the shade and the greater capacity of water retention, less leaching and greater content of organic substance, typical conditions of a soil richer in clay and organic elements, the presence of sand and silt in surrounding areas also suggests a clayey but not asphyxiated soil, with a good potential for oxidation of organic matters. The leaves of the H’Mông village express themselves with greater roundness in the cup, with a persuasive softness and with more animal and leathery hints, with less citrusy but warmer and more mature fragrances.

The tea area of Dao village overcomes a wild bamboo forest, there are many old and ancient trees, the climate is sunny and dry, and the soil is rocky-sandy, which will result in a possible slower growth rate of trees, given the possible greater difficulty for the soil to retain water, nutrients, greater leaching of minerals, erosive phenomena and loss of organic substance and this conformation is in line with a lower maturity of the soil given a lower presence of water. The leaves of the Dao village reveal more mineral and rocky accords, more citrus and herbaceous, a less imposing and soft body, more agile despite the medium thickness.

This is an example of how at a short distance, pedogenesis and transformative climate phenomena can change drastically, returning a vastness of results that cannot be found in most other areas of the world and how this complexity does not derive only from the altitude, therefore also translating into extremely different teas in an area of a few kilometers.

Mixing together the leaves of the two villages you get a concert of the unlikely son of Emily Dickinson and Rory Gallagher, the romantic essence with its disciplined lyricism and the annihilating chaos, the sublime that is the basis of great things.

The ambivalent aromatic essence of the leaves is initially dark, bringing back Bruegel’s Flemish nature in the almost primitive woodland scents, with memories of a bonfire extinguished in the rain, undergrowth and slightly animal smells.

Then the texture of tropical fruit and candied hibiscus, tomato leaf, orchard hay begins to emerge, supported by counterpoints of medicinal herbs, wild flowers and saltiness on the skin. On the sip it shows fullness, with notes of white mulberry, linden, apricot and slightly herbaceous hints. It is never prosaic and the thickness is sized and juxtaposed with freshness and minerality and a medium-low bitterness, which make drinking agile and never tiring.

The strong and relaxing and at the same time almost lysergic qi accompanies a persistent and very present huigan from the first cups.

You can find much more information on the Viet Sun website

4 August 2024
Discussing again about Yiwu and authenticity with a 2003 CNNP “Sheng Tai Gu Shu cha” via Camellia Sinensis

Almost 20 years have passed since the declaration of Yiwu as a “Special tourist village of Yunnan”, the program which aimed to attract more and more people to a city which was growing economically at a spasmodic pace and which was obsessively trying to make its authenticity perceived.

Often this intention came into conflict with the reality of a territory profoundly transformed, by wealth, by the introduction of QS, by the architectural disharmony caused by evident asymmetries in the urban development and modernization plan. Shortly thereafter, the rapid and unsustainable rise of the pu’er business would have collided with the bursting of the bubble, raising not only doubts about the economic future of families but also questions about the true authenticity of Yiwu tea which until then had faltered.

Those were years in which the vision was different, although not too distant from the current one, in which the importance of the object was provided by its price and not by its value, the meaning of tea was given by its correspondence to the useful; the forests, despite the already present distinction between them and the taidicha, were already utilitarianistically defined even before their understanding. While many farmers fought for their authenticity, just as many others built the stereotypes of heroic naturalism and “nostalgic” as a symbol of an identity that can be regained through tea, and clearly through its profits. “The truth” was not explored but a proud surrogate was created to be put on sale.

For this reason, my opinion of many teas from the early 2000s is less enthusiastic than what is out there, many although not all were soulless teas, on which was placed a fake effigy of cults and traditions. Without the soul and its intention there could be no authenticity, because in this way the past becomes irremediably past, the mythologies that have passed through it become dull and irremediably dead languages, or in any case incapable of supporting that subtle kinship that exists between thinking and memory, between memory and identity and between identity and the authentic.

This is a 2003 Yiwu pu’er “Sheng Tai Gu Shu cha” via Camellia Sinensis, in a CNNP label different from the typical “white and red zhong cha”, probably the result of an anonymous packaging from a small producer.

One of the testimonies in a “unknown soldier” version of an attempted reconquest of “the authentic”, of the traditional taste that does not come to terms with the conventional. The leaves bring with them smoky notes, of vetiver and seasoned cedar wood perfumes. From the gaiwan come the smells of an ancient lutherie and those of an old wooden church.

The aromas are reminiscent of dried flowers inside a book, evolving olfactorily towards notes of leather, virginia tobacco, incense, dried rose hip and pepper. The medium-thick sip ends on hints of tamarind, dried longan, dandelion root and medical herbs, fading into an ancient sweetness and granting a strong and focusing qi.

26 July 2024
Viet Sun Giàng Pằng 1 Big Tree sheng pu’er spring 2024

Giàng Pằng, it was the discovery of this village and its history, its culture and the ancestral nature of its landscapes that began what would be the focus of my attention for the last two years.

If we were in other parts of the world people would be there taking photos, absorbed, writing farewell poems about the transience of some exotic flower and the ephemeral duration of youth, but here there are only people, real people bent over by fatigue, with their colorful bandanas, clinging to their tenacity and resilience.

The streets are harsh, steep, the cinnamon bark is exposed to the sun, the tea is drying on bamboo mats, even the chickens think of the ephemerality of youth perched on wooden beams.

Here where not even the setting sun seems to find rest, the old tea trees appear like lignified bodies in an archaic dance, in a land that loves no middle ground. The clouds and rains rage in a despotic manner while the fog calms down giving a conciliatory impression, each element is in a disorderly way part of an atavistic work, a fragment of the dawn of the ages.

An anti-geometric vision where modernity barely finds space, where the succession of mountains in the distance creates its own rhythm in a primordial and perpetual order.

This is where VN tea becomes great and it can only be like this, because like every other mountain where the gods have found refuge, great things do not happen on slopes that do not bring suffering.

This Viet Sun teacomes from a batch processed by Steve, from a single big tree, in the spring of 2024, and is the juxtaposition between verticality and softness, between flesh, bone and soul.

The leaves are reminiscent of wild sour green plums, dehydrated longan with a slightly smoky streak, the aromas then focus on the undergrowth, apple wood and then give way to plum, aromatic herbs and light leathery nuances.

The sip is sartorially silky, measuredly round, with light bitterness and light astringency that ends with an excellent huigan. The strong qi accompanies an aromatic playground that goes from green melon to persimmons, in a continuous evolution infusion after infusion until it fades into accords of plum jam and alpine flowers bouquet.

14 July 2024
Unbound by fragrance – The tea of Ba Nuo through a 2022 teng tiao gushu

In recent years I have repeatedly had the pleasure of trying Ba Nuo teas, it is one of the places that perhaps more than others has taught me to free myself from the “aromatic” dimension of tea and to concentrate on the sip, on the tactile sensations, on the physicality of the brew.

Ba Nuo is a village accessible via narrow, dirt roads, you can still see the old houses, some with sheet metal roofs, flanked by other newer and larger ones, the result of overbuilding and the rush to compulsive urbanism that followed the economic growth of the tea villages.
Ba Nuo is located at 1900 meters above sea level, located on the eastern mountain range of Mengku, Dong Ban Shan, populated by around 300 families of the Han and Lahu ethnic groups, practically all of whom work in the tea industry. From the top you can see the villages on the western side, the Xi Ban Shan range, Dong Guo, Xiao Hu Sai, Da Hu Sai, Baka, as if immersed in a Bierstadt painting.

The soils contain a good amount of clay and organic matter, are acidic or sub-acid, with no stones on the surface, but what is striking are the Teng Tiao, also called “vine trees”, which appear like bony and lignified hands dating back to soil, without other plants to counteract them. Pruning the lateral branches favors the apical dominance of the plant, which will develop very elongated branching and leaves placed only on the tips.

Yang, a farmer from Ba Nuo, explained to me how it is not a natural way of cultivation, the land has been prepared, even weeded up to 15 years ago, the surrounding forest has been partly cut down to allow the tea trees to receive more light. Many trees were planted by the Lahu people as early as 300 years ago but the influence of the Han and modernization over time led to the development of this type of cultivation.

Despite the altitude, the agronomic peculiarities, it is not a tea that impresses with its aromas, it is not a complacent palliative for the slaves of fragrance. It took me five months to revisit this tea, perhaps among the most misunderstood in Yunnan, but also one of the most particular.

This Teasenz sheng was harvested in spring 2022 from teng tiao gushu, after being aged 7 months as maocha. I waited 5 months before trying it again, stored at 65% RH, slightly lower than what I store my teas at (68-69% RH).
Timidly the leaves began to advance notes of orchid, dandelion root, wood and toasted cereals. The sip was soft, with aromas of honey, chrysanthemum, apricot, but where it really struck was the qi. It wasn’t a sip that simply came and went, but it came again and again, it continually returned after each infusion and continued even far from the cup, the huigan accentuated the honeyed sweetness even more, surrounded by a light minerality that made the sip every time more pleasant.

7 July 2024
Memories of chatting about Mengsong and an old Bameng friend with a 2007 Teasenz gushu

I don’t think there can be any tea, any time, any sip without the people who bring with them the truth of a territory. One of the first tea maker I met was from Bameng, he worked for a factory in Mengsong and was nicknamed 小毛虫 “little caterpillar”. This name was given to him by his parents, when he used to sneak out of the woven wooden basket to observe spiders and insects while his family clung to the ancient trees for the harvest.

Every time he picked up those yellow caterpillars he went back towards his mother’s legs crying, with his face full of mud and his hands swollen from the stinging substance of the insect. He had an immoderate passion for those caterpillars and an even greater stubbornness.
His family’s teas were special, with that disarming power right in the mouth, his laughter when talking about the times now spent in his village were even more energetic.

His nickname also referred to the ability of those insects to transform, as well as the growth that his parents hoped for him. He incessantly emphasized how his village had changed, how the people of that place had changed and with them their landscape. We talked about how tea had been an alibi for both dreams and reality, a substance of conversion capable of overturning eras and conditions, of extracting from things its opposite.

We sipped pu’er talking about how the tea inherited its alchemical nature, as a transmutative substance and as a creator ex nihilo. The noise of the forest and of the harvest would always be the backdrop to his life and tea would always accompany him until the end of the sunset, until the last dance of the chrysalises.

This 2007 Mengsong Gushu by Teasenz reminds me of those chats, those powerful, intense and penetrating pu’er. The scent of wet leaves is reminiscent of leather boots, sundried plum, flambéed citrus peel together with the sensation of dried rose petals in the middle of an ancient book. Balsamic notes then appear, of turnips cooked over charcoal and in the background light nuances of an open tin of latakia tobacco placed on an old, slightly damp fir furniture.

The sip is silky with a medium persistence and an excellent sweetness accompanied by a typical salty flavor that recalls a pleasant mineral sensation of rock. A good huigan is surrounded by notes of roots, rhododendron honey, rose hips, plum and leather, adorned with an orchestra of citrus notes, balsamic candy and light traces of cardamom.

17 March 2024
A few words about Giàng Pằng, the village above the clouds, brewing a reviving 2023 spring sheng pu’er

You could hear the army advancing among the ancient tea trees, the march on the wet ground through those wooden body embraced by moss interrupted the solemn silence, the metallic noises of the pots and pans being brought along and that of the rifle shells dictated the rhythm of a macabre dance.
The H’Mông children looked at the soldiers, seeing every last remnant of soul in their eyes, acts of tenderness could still be observed on those difficult paths where the yellow grass interrupted the recurring reddish texture of the soaked clay, and so on for kilometers up to Phình Hồ accompanied by the abiding humidity that penetrated the bones and the scent of cinnamon trees mixed with that of the grease of damp weapons, and finally to Giàng Pằng.

This must be what Tô Hoài saw on his travels to Sùng Đô, Giàng Pằng, a village above the clouds whose houses at night, lit by fire, appeared to him like the fervent eyes of a young revolutionary woman, and when the fog vanished was like lifting the thin veil that covered her countenance.

Surrounded around the fire, the crackling of the bonfires reverberates on the branches above, producing a melody consecrating images and sounds of another world; the gaze turned to the forest of those who produce tea here seems persuaded by the same lifeblood of the camellia, of those who, despite the suffering and pain of loss, manage to live the “here and now” of their being without anything else, those who manage, despite it all, to consist in the last act of present.

Only in recent years the government tried to enhance this forest and the resilience and tenacity of its inhabitants, an attempt to return a product that is a reflection of the extraordinary uniqueness of its primordial topography and of its territory, rich in ancient tea trees and with an unimaginable potential.

The leaves of this 2023 spring sheng pu’er are harvested in Giàng Pằng, Yên Bái province, at 1400 m altitude. It is a mountain tea whose aromas unfold creating an ascension itinerary to the summit, the wet leaves begin with notes of wild flowers and medlars, enveloped in the scents of a pot in which peach jam is cooking. The interesting complexity develops in a crescendo of fermentative notes and macerated plum, tomato sauce and a bouquet of aromatic herbs accompanied by typical bread-making scents.
The sip has a medium thickness, is vibrant, fresh and surprisingly sweet, with low bitterness and astringency, adorned with a pleasant floral component and supported by a good huigan and a slight tang of wild berries.

19 February 2024
Reflections on ripe pu’er and an alchemical potion from Vietnam – Viet Sun Thượng Sơn Gushu Ripe 2017

I have always loved ripe pu’er fermented in small batches, artisanal productions that made me forget those old hypertrophic factories of Menghai, with those endless expanses of concrete on which the leaves are turned over and battered with old rusty construction shovels.

However, I hate many contemporary shu hyper-fermented in piles as tall as buildings, so thick that you struggle to move them with the tongue in your mouth and whose swallowing simulates an attempted suffocation.

Because for me a great tea is a cultural fact as well as a substance, which still represents people and territories, something that according to Dumas should be drunk on knees and with bare heads, which responds to the order of its terroir and not vice versa, a distillate of that perspective that the Greeks called aidos, the honest recognition that other things and people are more important than ourselves and not something to be lumped together until the bacteria perform some kind of transubstantiation.

This 2017 @vietsuntea pu’er comes from gushu in Thượng Sơn and it is more than a great tea, it is a remedy, an alchemical potion, an extract of those sunsets whose light reflected by the rice fields seems to create an apparent contrast between two skies.

It presents itself with a dark leather brown colour, the scent pervade the room with hints of molasses, rice pudding, hong dou sha, leavening dough, cocoa beans and dried fruit, all enveloped in hints of leather, antique wood and fermented leaves.

The liqueur is also peculiar, it is creamy, enveloping, silky but without that excessive thickness resulting from a fetishism for the jaw fatigue of some post-modern yunnanese shu. The sip is firm, old-fashioned, with a nostalgic sweetness of those times when the bitterness of Lao Man E was considered even slightly vulgar.

The qi is frighteningly tangible, the aromas almost recall those of a 30 year old Hermitage, the hint of licorice tells of a Greece it has never been to and the earthy and ricey accords gather with them the whole soul of its people. Around the world in a cup.

19 February 2024
Brief historical excursus on the efforts and resilience of the Anhua people

Politics clouded every public and private space in China at the end of the 70s, revolutionary inspiration raged incessantly from the large squares to the alleys of the rural dimension. The Hunan we know today, a land of extraordinary teas, has seen some of the most important Chinese political figures sit at its hickory wood tables.

The dark liqueur, imbued with smoky aromas, was a participant in the CCP meetings, a witness to history and speeches that were never revealed. The heicha was present during the strategies of a young chairman Mao, of Liu Shaoqi, Wang Zhen, and then-Liberation Army militant Hua Guofeng, who would become the main supporter of the monumental growth of tea cultivation and agricultural modernization during the Cultural Revolution.

Before leaving for Beijing, having defeated the gang led by Mao’s mad widow and being recognized as one of the most powerful men in China until the takeover of the Deng Xiaoping movement, he saw the acreage of Hunan tea increase from 42 to 172 thousand hectares in ten years, even if half were removed around the 90s.

It was the heicha that warmed the souls of the soldiers during the Sino-Japanese battle of Ichigo Operation, that sustained the squadrons on days when not even the land could give relief to the dead.

The huigan of a heicha dates back as the disenchanted voice of those who have now passed away and those who continue their work. Homeland of farmers, idealists, politicians, the look at Hunan is left to a feeling of fatigue and historical awareness that never seems to find rest.

Initially tea was a necessity for the inhabitants of the province, planting it meant having preferential access to coal, kerosene, iron for work tools and fertilizers, furthermore the cooperatives purchased all the tea produced with advances in cash, so that farmers could purchase inputs before harvest, although often at unfair prices.

Even today the roads that lead to Yiyang are part of an arduous pilgrimage where few still venture out, at times it seems like everything has remained still, you seem to have entered another era where in many rural villages no one will offer you a flat image for families or a little speech from a leaflet, rather a cup of tea together and lives to listen to. The people, the territory, are like their teas, a hermitage in the highlands, stranger to that sad modernist compulsion and the sadistic urbanism that seems to bypass history.

In many homes you can still see jars containing remedies and potions on wooden shelves, alongside old ceramic and copper teapots; you are greeted by the warm whine of the kettle on the stove, the wood is now white ash, the smell of smoke still sometimes saturates the atmosphere and the drops of condensation look like tears on the windows, those little things that drag you into your corner of familiar comfort even in the most remote place in the world.

Here, in the early Hongwu years of the Ming Dynasty, Shaanxi tea merchants opened a factory to purchase and process tea, then transport it to Jingyang. After fermentation and flowering was pressed into bricks and then sealed with hemp paper. The central government established inspection and transportation departments in Xining, Hezhou and other places in Shaanxi. Fucha was so important that to prevent tax evasion, sanctions were approved such as beheading for those who illegally left the province with tea and imprisonment or death sentence for officials who allowed their escape.

Anhua tea traders were later empowered to transport tea on grueling and brutal journeys across the Anhua Ancient Tea Horse Road, starting from the ancient market of Huangshaping and Yuzhou, along the Zishui River, then to Dongting Lake by sail boat, and then transferred it to Shaanxi.

However, the birth of the farmer movement and the Shaanxi-Gansu Muslim Uprising blocked tea trade routes in the northwest, resulting in a slowdown in trade and the people of Anhua found themselves without anyone to accept the import, creating a circuit of tax non-compliance that was at that point incurable. Furthermore, foreign capital took advantage of contractual asymmetries and inadequacies between sellers and the Qing government to directly purchase large quantities of cheap tea.

The first signs of recovery came with Zuo Zongtang’s “Tea Law”, opening the doors to a new tributary system and a new and prolific tea export route, but new problems were created, however, during the political disintegration of China under the blows of the warlords of Beiyang and in the early years of the Republic of China.

The central government’s control over local forces weakened considerably, the tea trade in the northwestern region was left to the local government which was solely concerned with the collection of tea taxes without any attention to direct control over tea market policies.

After a slight relief from the markets due to a fiscal relief of the provisional regulation of April 1942, throughout all the 40s to the following 40 years there would no longer be much news; the social unrest, the Sino-Japanese war, the consequent destruction of the roads to block supplies and the lack of intervention in the management of the markets in Hunan caused the disappearance of this type of tea, whose presence persisted almost exclusively at a local level.

The history of Anhua has always concerned people, going beyond politics, beyond market logic, carrying on its shoulders the weight of history and the torment that accompanies the sunset of eras, but it is certain that a new future awaits this territory, worthy of these people and their tea.

While I’m doing this soliloquy I’m drinking a wonderful Eastern Leaves 2007 Fucha from Anhua, and I am more and more convinced of how this is a tea that more than others is a veteran of incendiary contexts, a reactionary symbol endowed with the cadence of the human voice in narrating with spiritual sincerity our past, when farmers produced tea surrounded by the metallic noise of trucks and the smell of kerosene, fixing the historical truth in the persistence of consciousness.

25 December 2023
Finesse as redemption for Fengqing pu’er. Xiangzhuqing gushu sheng pu 2019 by Li Yu Lu

Hiking in Fengqing it is impossible not to arrive at what is perhaps the oldest tea tree in the world after drinking liters of that Fengqing 58 which is served in every single restaurant in the prefecture. But climbing higher up, towards 2000 meters beyond the taidicha and rice fields that continue northwards, near the villages of Chajia and Hedicun, you arrive at Xiangzhuqing, a small village at the foot of the peak with a fair amount of ancient trees around the village.

The air is cleaner, more humid, the heat stops in the Fengqing lowland and the rains fall timidly on the light sandy-ferrous soils of the mountain.
The extensive drainage, the scarcity of nutrients towards the surface layer creates a clear distinction with Mengku trees, environment and in the concentration of biocomponents in tea leaves.

Although it is assumed to be the same variety, Xiangzhuqing pu’er are lighter, floral and with almost no astringency and bitterness. They essentially seem like the less hypochondriac counterpart of some Yiwu teas on the Gaoshan side.

Encountering this 2019 gushu sheng from Mr. Li Yu Lu is a direct response to the arrhythmic advancement of Fengqing pu’er onto the market; fine, delicate teas that showcase Lincang in a new, renewed light.

The wet leaves seem to revive memories of a hot summer, with notes of persimmon, papaya, orange peel, in which balsamic tones and nuances of peach toffee candy, green melon, hay and dried apple alternate composedly. They are counterbalanced by floral hints of osmanthus, elderberry and scents of a walk in a freshly mown lavender field. More sharp fragrances emerge later such as rubber tree, juniper and black pepper.

The sip is at times monotonous but enlivened by a pleasant mineral verve, it is sugary, medium-bodied with a typical absence of astringency and bitterness, ending on juicy aromas of persimmon, mango jam and elderberry.

17 December 2023