Spring Harvest Adventures
Written by Winnie Yu
The most exciting time for the tea aficionado is the Spring, when all the tea plants sprout from dormancy in the Winter. This year, without exception, the teabuyers will be travelling again to key growing regions for the most sought after historical, as well as newly discovered, teas.
I am one of the tea buyers, and I cover mostly the East, such as China, Taiwan, and Japan. This year, my route will include India as well. Being the most important time of the year for us, our routes are generally very strenuous and compressed, as it is a race to include as many farms as we can, and the tea plants are all pretty much growing at the same time. Also this year, there will be several new places to explore, producers doing good work that we would like to interview, get to know better, and hopefully, introduce their teas to our constituents.
Our purpose is to be the curator, translator, and bridge to those remote areas that have been producing tea for centuries. Because of language and cultural barriers, and the fact that most of the best teas in the world are produced in Asian countries that only since recent decades have been accessible to the West, most of us are not at all familiar with the thousands of varietals and variations that teas are made. So much tea, so little time!
This year, I will be in Anhui for the Maofeng,Taiping Hou Kui greens and Keemun red teas, Nanjing for the Rainflower greens, Fujian for the white tea and handcrafted red tea, Guangdong for the Phoenix oolongs, Taiwan, and then, the Goomtee, India, for the Darjeeling. I look forward to these annual, month-long trips. Most of us will rarely get to visit all of those farms that are so familiar to us, the teabuyers. No successful tea farms exist in the U.S. except for a demonstration garden or two, other than some teas now growing in Hawaii. Each year, I try to bridge the gap between those strenuous buying trips in Asia and share the stories, whether big or small, and bring the production of tea to an intimate scale. Too often than not, we are not connected to our food anymore, as large agricultural companies manage and produce our food source, and we are never in contact with the growers and people. I believe that connection to these people are vitally important. Over the years, many of our customers have read profiles and background stories of many of these families and real people behind the tea. The special care and attention that the growers impart their products can also be a mentally nourishing fact as we appreciate just how well crafted and special these teas are. We find out that the farmers are people just like us, even if they live in remote mountains in foreign countries. They have families, they worry about their children, and they produce teas that they are proud of. I look forward to visiting each and every one of them like they are my own family members. I look forward to connecting these farm families to the community of tea aficionados in the U.S.
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