Moving right along through the white tea stash…
Andao is no more, but I still have a number of teas left from my one and only order back in the day, including a couple of white teas.
Because the company is kaput, I couldn’t find a picture of this. The dry leaves are prettier than most — I love the variegated colors, sizes, and shapes of white peony leaves and these are particularly attractive ranging from silver to dark brown and from long, thin, rolled leaves to short, flat, irregularly shaped ones. They smell earthy/planty with a sort of a darjeeling-like sharpness.
The tea is golden yellow and clear. If I poured it into a wine glass, I’d think it was chardonnay.
Flavor is tricky for me, as always with whites. Just when I think I’m finally starting to get them, I get stumped again. It probably doesn’t help that I had a cup of the Todd & Holland Champagne Raspberry right before this.
I’m getting as sweet smell from the cup, kind of like warm, spun sugar. Oddly, there’s a bit of undefined fruitiness as well. Flavor-wise, I get neither of those. But fortunately, I also don’t get the dead plant flavor that I sometimes get with white peony. There’s definitely and earthy/leafy flavor that screams “tea” — that flavor that makes me understand why people compare white tea to back tea even though they don’t really taste anything like each other.
Tomorrow I’ll try it first thing, even before food, and see if that makes a difference.
My highest rated white peony appears to be Adagio’s with a 72. I think this deserves higher. In reading my note on the Adagio, I think I was still in my “noob trying to understand stuff and really searching for what I think should be there” phase rather than the more experienced and blunt place in which I now find myself.
Flavors: Earth, Sugar
