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The Winter Harvest
Written by Winnie Yu, co-founder of Teance
Soon, I will be traveling again, seeking teas grown in the steep mountains of Asia, far away from cities, pollution, and noise. In the winter at the tea farms, the only sounds you hear are the roosters crowing in the morning, the zip in your ear by the swallows that cut through the air. Breathing in the heavy moisture, peering but not seeing through the dense fog, the soggy red soil beneath my feet, once again communing with the tea farmers over the oolongs. In the end of the winter, I await breathlessly for the spring teas. In the fall, I simply can not wait for the winter crop to arrive.
At the end of the year, there is really only one type of fresh tea harvested: oolong teas. The leaves grow stronger and the new sprouts are nourished from the summer hiatus, for no respectable tea farmer would harvest in the summer when the leaves are coarse and waxy. So the bushes are allowed to rest in the summer. The resultant leaves are like winter: darker, but richer, unlike the flighty fragrances of the spring. Even Baochong oolong from northern Taiwan, one of the most outstandingly aromatic teas, boasts of a deeper tone, the floral fragrance now more like honeysuckle in the palate.
My favorite teas arrive in the winter. In China, the Monkey Picked Tikuanyin, for example, lends itself best harvested under colder conditions; the thick, fleshy leaves pour a ripe honeyed note coaxed forth from the charcoal fire roasting. Often, charcoal fire overpowers the fresh floral quality of the spring crops, but perfectly balancing the winter. No monkeys picked these leaves, most fortunately, though they grow on very steep high mountains. No monkeys could manage to pick just the right size leaves that would produce the perfect oolong, a young tippy bud in the center flanked by opposing, mature leaves, with as little twig as possible. Scanning through a field of millions of leaves, a pair of very dexterous hands, fast scouting eyes, and a strong back allows the women of the tea farms to carry the beginning of a very important chain, hopefully towards producing an award winner.
Often, when I am trekking through a tea mountain, I would come upon a trickling stream. I would start climbing up the rocks to see where the source of that stream came from. It would prove to be progressively steeper, sometimes revealing to be a broad stroke of water peeling down a bald rock, sometimes the source seems to come from a small water fall. The waters flow, nourishing the roots, but never in drowning quantities. These waters grow the tea bushes, we dry the leaves and process them, and then we steep these leaves back in water to produce a beverage called tea. In the winter, the rains are usually constant but not drenching, which tea bushes prefer. The spring time torrential rains sometimes 'dilute the taste of the leaves too much', explain the farmers. The lighter but persistent rains also produce more constant and slower streams of water, and will not cause mudslides on the steep hills that can wash away the tea bushes. One only needs to travel to Alishan in Taiwan to see, along the way, how half of the mountain faces have fallen off in the form of rolling boulders and avalanches of mud. Teas grow best in vertical hills with good drainage, but not at the risk of rolling off the mountain. The winter rains are therefore preferred, and the winter tea harvest can claim this merit over the spring.
I look forward to the winter oolongs with the same anticipation as the spring, for the two seasons do not produce the same teas. The energy of imminent dormancy, the slower streams, the cold crisp air warmed by the charcoal fire roasting the leaves, give way to a heavenly aroma emanating from the bamboo roasting baskets, creating a beverage called tea. A beverage that can speak of the air, weather, mountain, people, water, as well as the seasonal differences- a beverage with both breadth and depth.
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