Description
Grown on the pristine foothills of the Himalayas, the leaves and white tips are lightly oxidized to preserve its fresh flavors. This AV2 cultivar tea also has the advantage of enjoying superb growing conditions at the highest estate in Darjeeling. Making it one of the highest quality white teas on the market. Complex flavors of almond, layered with melon sweetness and citrus highlights, embedded in a light bodied liquor.
Origin & History
The official origin of oolong teas is lost to history, but there are several origin myths, if you will, that make convincing arguments. Two origins hold that oolong teas likely originated in the Fujian province as part of a tea tradition known as Beiyuan - a type of tea given as tribute to the emperor. Located around the Phoenix (Fenghuang) Mountain in Fujian, which still produces some of the world's best teas today, this famous Song Dynasty (960-1279 CE) tea was compressed in little cakes.
The first origin story holds that oolong tea came into being as the aforementioned Beiyuan tribute teas transitioned from tea cakes to loose leaf teas, when the cakes fell out of favor with royalty during the Song Dynasty. The two tribute teas are long (dragon) and Fenghuang (phoenix). In this story, the new form of processing gave rise to the name Black Dragon, or oolong in English.
The second story is that during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912 CE) a man nicknamed Wulong in the Anxi region of Fujian became distracted during the harvest and accidentally allowed his leaves to oxidize. This is very, very similar to the founding myth of black tea, which blames an inconveniently invading army for interrupting the harvest, causing the good town folk to abandon their crop and allow the leaves to fully oxidize.
The final theory comes from the “Anxi” theory, which claims that oolong tea was first discovered in the Anxi region of the Fujian province when a man named Sulong, Wulong or Wuliang, accidentally allowed his tea leaves to oxidize after being distracted during the harvest.
By the mid-1900s, the popularity of oolong teas had grown so much that oolong tea production began in Taiwan. Because of the variable weather and terrain throughout Taiwan, the profiles and overall quality of teas grown there are rather unpredictable and can change dramatically from season to season.
Although the cultivation of oolong tea has spread through various parts of Asia and all the way to India and Nepal in the past decade, the best oolongs today still tend to come from the Anxi and Fujian regions of China or Taiwan and are still best enjoyed using the methods that were crafted during its early inception.
