Ya-Ya’s Tea-Board

When our shipment of shincha (Japanese for “new tea”) arrived yesterday, we couldn’t wait to sit down and have an extended tasting. Our 2007 senchas were harvested between May 13^th and 20^th and flown to us in New Zealand directly after processing to ensure maximum freshness.

Along with the order of two senchas and a genmaicha we’re offering at the teahouse, we ordered some Gyokuro for our personal tea collection (at the moment there’s not yet a big enough market to stock this very expensive and short-lived tea at the teahouse). Gyokuro is the highest grade of Japanese tea and is only produced once a year from the first spring picking of the young leaf buds. Its very limited production makes it an extremely expensive tea that is traditionally given as a special gift.

We called a friend - and fellow tea-lover - to arrange a gyokuro tasting. As it turned out, he had 3 gyokuros (from last year) in his tea stash and we brought along our 3 gyokuros that had just arrived that day. It promised to be an interesting experience since none of us had ever tried more than one or two gyokuros side-by-side. Since we had 2 kyusu (small Japanese teapots) that we use for gyokuro, we did 3 rounds with 2 teas. The tasting was done blind for Diane and our friend (since I prepared the teas, I knew the source of each pot). Preparation parameters were (mostly) 2 infusions with 1 tablespoon leaves to 100ml water (60°C).

The wide range of flavours came as a surprise to all of us. While slight seaweed notes - that are so typical for Japanese greens - were present in different intensities in all of them, other flavours ranged from sweet (which is a flavour usually attributed to gyokuro) to savory and salty (maybe better described as umami). They also differed considerably in the “shape” the flavour takes in the mouth. When I’m talking about “shape” here, I mean it in a physical sense. With one tea I could feel the flavour forming something like a ball that rolled slowly over my tongue and rested in the middle for a little while before making its way back towards my throat. A very exciting sensation I’ve never experienced before. Another one created the “shape” of a doughnut, leaving a hole in the middle and developing the flavour in a circle around the tongue.
While 4 of the 6 tasted like pure gyokurus of outstanding quality, the remaining 2 had an almost oolong-like taste to them (one even made an almost yellow infusion) and it seemed they had slightly oxidized during their year of storage. We were very curious about how the fresh teas compared to the ones stored for about 1 year. Our friend - who’s a wine maker with an incredibly developed sense of taste and smell - and Diane picked the fresh teas we’ve just received as rank 1 - 3, closely followed by one of the older teas. The remaining two were not further mentioned except for the information that our friend had bought one of them for the exorbitant price of AUS$60 for 50g.
On an interesting side note: we all came up with the same ranking. The tea that all three of us liked best wasn’t the most expensive tea (which was the tea that formed the donought on our tongue), but it was the tea that formed “the ball of flavour”.

After going through the hard work of tea tasting, we concluded the night with a fine bottle of red wine (Yann Chave, Croze Hermitage, Rhone, Le Rouvre 2005), which set a nice contrast to the light tea with its full body and blackberry notes.

WARNING: Don’t try this at home (at least in the evening)! After this memorable evening indulging in the fine art of Japanese tea, I spent an almost sleepless night paying for my eagerness to try all those teas and thereby inducing a caffeine overload.