When the fragile walls of the pu’er business were crumbling in the early 2000s, many people stood in front of the screens in the Kunming tea market, crystallizing an evocative image, a shared moment of sadness, like those who see their home demolished, those who see their expectations burned, like smokers outside the doors of a hospital, staring at their affliction in the smoke while waiting for some unexpected good news.
And so the pu’er gone in a single morning, as if all the wealth accumulated up to that point was worth as much as a bright day that tries to make us forget that dark, but much more natural, light from which we defend ourselves at every moment.
Dark like the soul of this shou, with a frowning and crepuscular essence, with aromas that come from the shadows, from the underground warehouses of humid cities, from the decadence of nature in autumn.
In those years, pu’er was sold as a commodity capable of accumulating value and in which to find authenticity. In a country in total growth, there was a frantic search for an identity, for its rediscovery and subsequent affirmation, through rites, the ostentation of them and gambling. But not so much of the true rites but rather a plasticization of them to compensate for the sense of loss that nostalgia brings with it.
In the ritual, in the tea, those who waited, resisted and dared found refuge, they survived because it is the ritual that acts as a contrasting agent thanks to which our present takes on clearer contours even in the darkest night, they fulfill the function of a revealing bath capable of showing the latent image of identity through the reduction of the superfluous.
In the recovery of the ritual one struggles with oneself and the struggle takes shape when one compares the old action with the new action, with the dynamics that are emerging, when one places the travelled path alongside the new scenario.
In ritual opera, things are not consumed or used but rather lived, so that they can age and bear witness. Tea was thus able to recover its place in rituality and with it the integrity of its experience that the period of compulsive enrichment had tried to hide.
This 2006 CNNP yellow mark embodies the residue of that incendiary period, you find that something in it that is not destined to survive but which nevertheless resists and remains. It wears the color of an old vintage Port and in its fragrances of tobacco, old leather, humid wood, lacquered mahogany and jujube you find that pain of uncertainty that constitutes the matrix, the deep layer of something true, intentional, positive.
The light fermentation has allowed it to survive the banality of many of its peers, to escape the hermetic isolation of immediacy that the over-dense, black as tar and hyper-fermented shou demand. In the mouth it’s silky, of proportionate sweetness with aromas of malted brown bread, raisins, butter cream, chinese herbs, brown sugar and ancient wood.
Tea by Le meilleur the de chine
Wild Harvested 