303 Tasting Notes
The scent of the dry tea is dominated by a very melony note of prickly pear. On sight it’s definitely a rooibos, but eyes closed it smells pale green. I prefer keeping my eyes open, though, as it’s such a pretty tea – riddled with perfect little rose buds and chunks of fruit.
In the cup, it’s quite flavourful, but still manages to come off light, accessible and eminently drinkable.
[Purchased at Tehörnan in Uppsala, fall 2012.]
Preparation
This tea just kills me.
The first time I made it, I was on holiday in Maui and got distracted by something (so many tall, tanned distractions in Maui) leaving the poor oolong to steep for 25 minutes. It was SO bitter… and it was still so good I couldn’t help drinking it.
Then I tried it iced, and it was pure perfection.
And now I try to avoid drinking it altogether, because I have no idea when I’ll be in the vicinity of a Lupicia again.
See? This tea will be the death of me.
The scent of the dry tea is something I often find myself hallucinating. I know it so well, and love it so much, it sometimes just assaults me out of nowhere and makes me crave a cup. It has the lushest, ripest mangoed scent, but there’s also a bright, leafy oolong note. These strands of scent intertwine beautifully and lose no potency in the brewed tea.
The flavour is equally gorgeous. In terms of mango oolong, nothing can beat this. It’s full-bodied, soothing, half-elegant, half-wild and just… perfect. It’s perfect.
Beautiful re-steep(s).
[Purchased at Lupicia in Honolulu, December 2012.]
Preparation
Wow, you’ve sure travelled the world!
Tea is one of the main things I shop for when I travel, that’s why the tasting notes end up reading like travelogues on occasion!
This is one of my favorites – I almost like the mango flavoring here better than I like actual mango, even!
The dry tea smells absolutely gorgeous. There’s fruit with a kick of sweetness, followed by that characteristic sea-buckthorn tea scent that’s so hard to characterize.
(The wet tea leaves smell like waterlogged puffed rice!)
In the cup, the scent is more vegetal than sweet, again in the typical manner of sea-buckthorn brews. The sweet fruity notes return to some degree in the aftertaste, but there’s a surprising amount of astringency.
[Purchased at Bönor & blad in Uppsala, August 2013.]
Preparation
I’m cheating just a bit – I had this before, but as an after-dinner tea to accompany raspberry sorbet. It turned the whole thing into the most berryful of orgies, so I didn’t bother with a tasting note.
I still find flavoured black teas slightly overwhelming at times. There’s just so much of everything. Then again, black teas get away with things a green tea never could. This makes them so much harder for me to analyze using scent alone.
In the case of Fruites del bosc, the forest fruits in question are very present in the nose; the berry aroma is deep and rich and tart, which is nice enough, but there’s just so much of it.
In a green tea, or an infusion of some kind, this kind of berry would probably end up tasting like a mouth/noseful of chemicals when steeped. The black tea, on the other hand, rounds off the flavouring nicely. The base tea is very present scent wise in the cup, but the taste is more subdued. The individual berry notes are mostly lost, and the end result is a somewhat generic, impersonal berry. I would have enjoyed some more character, and maybe a little less tartness.
And, I guess, an element of surprise. This tea is exactly what it says it is, and though it may seem unfair to detract points for honesty, I do love a good trickster.
[Gifted by my friend T, who got it for me in Barcelona in August 2013.]
Preparation
Much like in the case of Rouge Provence, this is a tea I gifted someone who ended up hogging it relentlessly – you know, ‘I swear I saved some for you, but then I was all out of tea and I HAD to drink it!’ (Uh-huh.), so it does seem it has a certain suave appeal.
In terms of looks and scent, it far surpasses the Rouge – it’s very pretty, and adds complex layers of fruits and florals to the nose.
The flavour, though – it’s a perfect, green echo of the rooibos, but it’s so polite. So elegant. So sophisticated. This reminds me of the Thé à l’Opéra (Mariage Frères)/Bravissimo! (Lupicia) comparison I made earlier this week.
I suppose I just have to face that my crush on the Mad Hatter is permanent and that I’ll always favour the anti-heroes.
[Surreptitiously acquired from Mariage Frères in London, August 2013.]
Preparation
The first time I smelled this tea, it was so familiar. I’m absolutely elated it only took one more whiff to figure it out, because it’s a weird one and it would have driven me crazy trying to hunt it down.
Dry, Thé des Impressionistes smells like… Shea Butter Hand Repair Cream with Cocoa Butter & Sesame Oil from Burt’s Bees.
It really, genuinely does.
The tea is more elegant, of course; where the hand cream speaks of long days in the freezing potting shed, the tea is smooth and creamy and indoorsy with a hint of something delectable baking in the oven – most probably Nigella’s Dense Chocolate Loaf Cake (http://food52.com/blog/5226-nigella-lawson-s-dense-chocolate-loaf-cake).
This is all scent so far – I’ve been so torn about tasting this (It smells like hand cream! And Nigella!) I’m doing a live tasting note in case it’s so horrifying I need moral support.
…
Okay, in the cup this just gets stranger. No hand cream. A dash of Nigella, but it’s a good dash. This comes off as a light, sophisticated gingerbread-esque shortcake.
I’m extremely confused by this tea right now, but I do enjoy it.
[Surreptitiously acquired from Mariage Frères in London, August 2013.]
Preparation
I’d be skeptical about trying a tea that smells like hand cream too!
Haha, yeah – but we have to be brave!
I’d always wondered what this tea tastes like. Not quite what I imagined, but it does sound interesting!
I have a sample from Ruby Woo Scarlett to try so I’ll jump on it to smell if I get the hand cream too !
I had some of the Burt’s Bees cream lying around, so I sat there smelling the tube (sniff) and then the tea (SNIFF) and then both (sniff-SNIFF-sniff-SNIFF). It was completely ridiculous, but it did smell so much the same to me.
Look forward to reading some more tasting notes on this!
When I buy teas, I generally pick them out myself, going on scent alone – this is why so many of my ratings are clustered in the 80-90 range; I know what I’m going to like in the cup. When I procure tea in a different manner, though, anything can happen. For my latest Mariage Frères batch, I used reviews to put my list together. When I then smelled the actual teas, some of them were really surprising – the Marco Polo blends more than any other.
Overripe, boozy plums are what I get from the dry tea. This carries through into the cup, but not overwhelmingly so, and with a stronger addition of florals. Not well-behaved cutting flowers, however – cryptid, deceptively lovely plants alive only as rumours in the journals of long-dead explorers, maybe.
This really is a very tipsy blend. It’s walking around the orchard in the fall, trying not to crush fat, juiced-up wasps feasting on rotting fruit underfoot. It’s an autumnal tea, echoing that brief half-mesmerizing, half-terrifying time of year when the death throes of decaying summer are balanced perfectly by the crisp, clear freshness of impending fall.
Balance really is the key word here – this is a tea that could easily have gone wrong, in spite of all its velvety smoothness. But go wrong it doesn’t.
It’s exactly what it should be.
[Surreptitiously acquired from Mariage Frères in London, August 2013.]
So, when I had this, I realized I could barely remember what actual prickly pears tasted like, just that I was never particularly fond of them. They’re in season right now, so I bought a couple. And ew. It’s the papaya-like blandness that gets me down; it’s like a mealy papaya, with some additional grainy, watermelony textures, and seeds that are like passion fruit seeds at an early stage of beta testing. This tea is all the prickly pear I need in my life.