Wild Harvested

Tag: b157

  • The Design of Ephemeral Grace – Seven Essence 2025 Spring Quiescence

    The Design of Ephemeral Grace – Seven Essence 2025 Spring Quiescence

    Quiescence is the child of temptation, a tea that crashes in like Dean Moriarty’s wild, unhinged laughter, a tea that halts time, that fills empty spaces with the substance of life.
    It’s a spring harvest from cultivar B157, one of those rare works that appear once every four springs, refusing to exist in reflections, in mirrors, in repetition.

    The wet leaves smell of frangipani and vanilla, laced with the almost milky notes typical of Taiwanese oolongs. It feels like it fell from a Liberty canvas, dried in the dawn sun of Los Angeles, back when the light was still golden and the air almost liquid.

    It’s a hymn to creative impulse, to those destined to vanish, leaving behind only a trace,  like perfume on a pillow, or a copy of Les Fleurs du mal forgotten on a veneered nightstand, underlined, underlined everywhere.

    The sip is soft, pliant, sweet. It leaves a creamy, floral, almost cosmetic film on the tongue. You can sense the intent, the effort to craft an exceptional tea, every sharp edge softened like a minimalist organic vase. Its aromatic texture feels woven through an analytical, obsessive, surgical search for sensation.

    Sweet notes surface, mango custard, whipped cream, a whisper of osmanthus water. It’s the ultrasound of a happy childhood memory, evaporating into something denser, more designed.
    It lingers in the mouth, clinging to the palate, with a hauntingly familiar aftertaste of strawberry cream.

    There’s a quiet sense of luxury in all of this.
    It’s like stepping into a room decorated only in pale gold and French velvet, with bottles of Champagne scattered across the floor,  where nothing is left to chance, and even the dust participates in the choreography.

    It’s a layered, intentional experience. A reminder that 2025 is a truly remarkable year for Darjeeling.

  • A Theatrical Infusion of Desire and Disorientation. Seven Essence Darjeeling Autumn Caprice

    A Theatrical Infusion of Desire and Disorientation. Seven Essence Darjeeling Autumn Caprice

    Seven Essence Caprice is the whim that comes from that land pushed to the edge of the sky, it’s the tea you wished you could offer to the stranger you met every morning on the subway, with that porcelain skin not exactly free from subtle traces of time, those perfectly arranged marks that made her attractively real and weave memories of encounters that never happened in your mind. But you never came up with the right words, only the absurd idea of the right tea to offer her, and that tea is this.

    The leaves, once wet, declare themselves on tones of magnolia, mango pulp and tomato. Then come marine notes with a Mediterranean accent-hints of salicornia, caper, green olives, and herbs butter. The extraordinary complexity reverberates in the mouth with aromas of millefeuille, white peach and cactus leaf to close a theatrical sip, sweet and at the same time salivating and refreshing.

    These notes are the orchestral delirium that connects Akita Tonburi with horseradish cream to the hysteria of strawberries with rose jam and frozen cherry blossoms at Eleven Madison, they are the trigger for a ecstatic dance in the middle of those buildings on the upper west side that stand like giant soldiers at the service of the stock market and you are leaning against the wall, rolling your tongue on the palate, trying to retrieve those aromas of mango, green plum and wild strawberries. Caprice is the highlight of the day before you disappear into the usual pre-war urban coffee shop between 6th Avenue and 8th Street, with late Art Deco interiors mixed with a sober mid-20th-century functionalism, with the reek of scrambled eggs and burnt fat in the air, the typical late-night aroma that smells of debt, perdition and broken promises useful for detoxing from the unbridled luxury of Caprice.

    It’s difficult to write about a tea like this without it seeming like an act of submissive flattery, I assure you that it’s not a simple narrative, but with some teas you don’t witness a simple act of tasting but rather a controlled hallucination, designed for those who seek disorientation and sudden revelation in taste, they are a sensorial vertigo, a chase in a context of constant perceptive tension.

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

    Beyond the ordinary concept of craftsmanship. Seven Essence Darjeeling Gossamer

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

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

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

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

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

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