Vert Provence

I am not very confident with green tea, to me tasting a green is like playing lottery.
I find greens a little capricious especially because of the bitterness we can sometimes get (even if we steep the correct time)

This time I won at the lottery ! Thanks so much to cteresa for permitting me to taste this fantastic blend – I am just surprised you didn’t review it yet-sure you will asap your cold will disappear :)

Delicate and refined green tea base without any hint of bitterness nor astringency.

I get more the fruity notes (berries)and behind, in the supporting role the floral notes (rose is the floral leading note to me and then lavender)

I really enjoyed it – did anyone tried it iced ?

Meh. This green tea base seems to be the typical cheap Chinese sencha base that I don’t like. The oddly cooling mentholy and piney lavender is retry well balanced with the sweet fragrant rose. If you like rose and lavender, you’ll like this. And it’s all enhanced with berry flavoring. I’m tasting cherry.
I’m not too impressed with this but I’m grateful to have tried it, thanks to Dustin’s generosity. :)

I do not know quite what to think of this tea – basically I think this is a sublime masterpiece blend but which I do not quite love. I have been not in love with flavoured green teas lately so maybe that is it. But more on why I think this is masterful.

The dry leaf smell of this is possibly the best ever for me. I took a sniff and said, yep I will take it. If this was a perfume I would buy it and wear it, if it was a candle I would get it. It´s a mix of red fruits (cassis surely, maybe raspberry as well) and flowers (rose maybe, lavender) and I think thyme as well and possibly other herbs. It should be an everything but the kitchen sink mess, and somehow it is not, it´s music made of scents.

I brewed this not too hot (maybe not quite 90 C), not too long with a generous scoop. It came out quite pale, not bitter but with some astringency (too hot maybe?), and with strong taste notes of everything on the dry leaf smell, plus a certain grassy something from the green tea which just adds to the impression of being a garden like drink.

So why don´t I love it? Just don´t know. Maybe I just need time to figure it out a bit better, maybe I fell in love too much with the scent and no taste could compete. Will have fun drinking the rest of this, and maybe my feelings will change. Even if I do not quite love it as much as I thought I was going to, this is still a tea I recommend people check out, this is just amazing and really undescriptable!

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.]

I remember the first time I found this tea, I was in the Mariage Frères on the Place de La Madeleine, it’s a funny little shop without the full tea room as you would find (for example) in Rue Bourg Tibourg in the 4th, no this was in an area surrounded by the exclusive epiceries of Hédiard and Fauchon. Thus, though they did not have a tea room (why bother when you are competing with Laduree too?) they carried quite an extensive range of teas, not to mention a complete selection of the paraphanalia of tea: everything from sables au the (Tea flavoured biscuits!) to mousselines de coton (muslin tea bags, either filled with your tea or empty) to théières (tea pots sounds much more profound in French!) and all sorts of items.
Thus, the sight of this tea on my shelf in it’s bag, and even the handwriting of the lovely man who sold it to me, still make me think of the discovery of this wonderful tea – why? Because it reminded me that it’s not all the same, not every tea is the same.

And how, is this “fruit green tea blend” (how boring sounding??) so different?
Well, firstly, from the first wiff when you open it, you are hit in the face by Lavender – uniquely, it has not just the flowers but, I remember the Mariage Frères assistant pointing out, the oil of lavender and rose in it – so it’s quite unique because lavender is not used that often in blends of tea, because it can be overpowering.
In amongst the flowers, there are herbs like rosemary and thyme, which also feature strongly in the scent, and touch on the taste too. Amongt the herbs, you can subtlely taste the flowers (rose, violet) and the fruits (lemon, orange, berries).

The other thing i love about this tea, is after transporting me to Paris on looking at it and deciding to grab it off the shelf, when I open it I am then transported to Provence: over a month spent walking the hills of Venasque (nr Avignon), smelling the lillies, the lavender, walking through “le voie des cerises” – the avenue of cherries, and finally spending hours carefully tending vineyards in the early spring to get them ready to bud and grow all summer.
All of that, in a tea, not sure how that is possible, but it does remind me of it!

The brewing?
I would definitely use 1.5 desert spoons for a 6 cup pot, and use water off the boil, and brew very quickly with this particular tea – the colour comes out a very awesome bright green, and is super refreshing, like drinking a valley full of flowers and trees.
I can recommend it any time of day, but I think the lavender definitely gives it an aspect of unwinding, so perhaps evening is better.

Anything else?
Just an lovely tea, exceptionally well blended – I gave the man in the shop a description of what I was looking for: not a black tea, something a bit outside the box, with unusual flavourings that blend well with a lighter tea and he pondered for a while, and found me 3 different teas (including this one) and I think I bought all three!

At first i didnt like this tea too much- but now it starts to grow onto me. Subtle nuances are making each cup a new adventure. A tea well woth exploring.

So far I kinda like this tea. It is kind of fruity floral, but not any one thing that I can put my finger on and pick out by name. It is nice and smooth with the green tea hanging out in the background, but so far isn’t anything I have to have in my cupboard. We’ll see if it grows on me.

Very subtle green tea with lots of flowery overtones. Mild and soothing.

Sipdown no. 24 of 2023 (no. 682 total).

I sipped this down a couple of weeks ago. Things have been so discombobulating lately I didn’t get around to recording the sipdown. I have been traveling a lot, mostly taking no. 2 for college tours. I am enjoying it but he’s nervous even though his grades couldn’t be better — it is so very hard to get into college these days, especially the University of California, and his frontrunner is UCSD with its 34% acceptance rate.

In any case, this was a lovely take it to work tea. When I don’t have green tea for a while, I forget how much I like it. What I noticed the most with this one at this late date in its shelf-life (when anyone but me, the completionist, would probably just have tossed it) was the lavender, which was mostly what I got from this very old tea, along with a generic, mild fruitiness. Soothing.

A sample from Cteresa. I tried Rouge Provence earlier today, and was half expecting this to be very similar, but it’s actually a completely different experience. A more complete experience, perhaps. I used 1 tsp of leaf, and gave it 2.5 minutes in water cooled to around 180. The liquor is a bright, grassy green; it’s a completely fabulous, young grass on a bright summer day, kind of colour. Very sunny! Just looking at it cheered me up.

To taste, the flavour I pick up straightaway is cherry. Black cherry, to my tastes, followed by a hint of blackberry. It’s a beautifully natural, fruity, juicy flavour – no children’s cough medicine here! In the mid-sip, I can pick out a hint of rosemary, maybe a touch of thyme. Finally, rounding out the whole thing are lavender and rose. It really is like a journey through Provence — from fruit, through herbs, into flowers. There’s a mild grassiness from the green tea base in the aftertaste, and a tiny bite of astringency. Perhaps two minutes brew time would have been enough, but it’s so slight it’s hardly worth complaining about.

It’s not often that I prefer a green tea to a red or a black, but in this case I’m happy to say that I do. This version is a far more complete experience, to my tastes — it puts me in mind of France, and Provence, far more than the Rouge did — although I really do like that one also. Many thanks to Cteresa for allowing me the opportunity to compare the two. It’s made for a very enjoyable morning’s tea tasting!