Tea boredom
Posted on 24 February 2011
I’ve spent a week away from home in Tuscany – see my posts on Chianti and Brunello – with no access to my tea cabinet, utensils or even properly heated water. As usually on those trips, I took a jar of tea and a lidded porcelain cup to enjoy on the move: I wrote about my approach to this here.
That jar would be enough for 3 months of travelling.
My choice this time was the 2009 Spring Dongding ‘Classique’ from Teamasters. In itself it’s a mightily fine tea – deep and complex with excellent controlled roast, just the way I like it. In fact it came a close second in a blind tasting of Taiwan oolongs I did last year, looking for a tea to lay down for ageing (I’ll write up that tasting soon).
Good leaves, perfect roast: in itself it is a delicious tea.
Well, after a week of brewing this tea I honestly can’t stand it. I’ve become so imbibed with its flavour I’d rather have anything else. It’s interesting how dependent our tastebuds are on variety (and I wonder how personal and subjective this is). It’s fine to drink seven or eight tiny cups of the same tea when you brew it the gongfu way (and the flavour changes significantly during that series) but seven days with the same thing in your cup is close to unbearable, in my book. It might have to do with how I’ve been brewing it (universally with a single long steep on just a bit of leaves, which tends to generate a flatter, simpler profile anyway) and the type of tea too (roasted oolong is a pretty subtle, soft tea; green sencha or young puerh would likely have been sprightlier and less boring) but it got me thinking how we perceive tea and wine.
A few grams for a large cup of water and 5 minutes of brewing yield this deep amber-brown colour.
It’s rare to drink the same wine over anything longer than an evening or two. Even if you buy wine by the case, you open those bottles at lengthy intervals, and a single bottle never goes a very long way. (In fact, it’s frequent to feel there’s been too little in the bottle). Tea is different. You ‘have’ tea; it sits in that jar for extended periods of time and if you, like me, have built up a sizeable reserve, you’ll find yourself drinking the same teas dozens of time. Drinking wine is like a visit to a paintings gallery; drinking tea is more like owning the painting. Nothing wrong with the latter, but you need to learn to live with it.
Disclosure
Source of tea: own purchase.