I am of two minds about Adagio’s Dragonwell. At first, this tea kept pulling me back to the green side. So distinctive, so nutty, so mellow, and with a singularly flat leaf shape that must have romanced many a wooden-hulled tea-trader in centuries gone by, Dragonwell was the first tea that made me want to extrapolate tasting notes like a wagonized wino — the sort of ever-so-slightly unusual tea, I felt, that implied literary tributes, glamorous odes, maybe even a saucy limerick or two. When I wanted something different, Dragonwell was the tea for which I reached into my disturbingly organized tea cupboard.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I discovered how much Steepsterites hate Adagio’s rendition of Dragonwell! The vitriol, the vitriol: it is enclouding all the drinking water! But I kid, I kid. I am the first to acknowledge my current green tea rank, which is, summarily, “Novice Green Tea Admirer: Ready and Willing to Advance,” so it is now my mission to try another brand’s offering. I shall not give up on you, Dragonwell! I shall solve your bestially-leafed mystery!
P.S. It is disturbing to think that perhaps the flavor I associate with Dragonwell is not really Dragonwell at all, rather like the old philosophical chestnut: “What if what I see as the color orange is not the color you see as the color orange? How would we ever know?” Lucky for me and the dragons, a tea mystery is far more experimentally-based than a philosophical one.
I’ve never been more ready to put together my usual tea-haikus, which are two in number for this well of debated dragons:
Long-bodied, chartreuse,
nutty dragon at the well:
are you déclassé?
Is this Dragonwell
I see before me? Come, let
me clutch another.
(Sorry about that last one, Mr. Shakespeare. Sort of.)
