Madame la Marquise

Sipdown! (47 | 394)

So I finally made a Camellia Sinensis order recently. Even though I’ve been trying not to buy much tea, I got a notification that their wintergreen was back in stock so I jumped on it immediately. I mostly chose their Quebec herbal tisanes, but a few flavored tea samples also hitched a ride.

The apricot here is on point. It tastes so natural, with a juicy sweet-tart flavor. Maybe closer to a dried apricot than a fresh one in terms of intensity? However, there’s something about the oolong that I’m just not loving. Mostly it tastes like a fairly standard green oolong – lightly grassy/leafy with a smooth minerality and hints of stonefruit and flowers. However, there’s some other note here that almost reminds me of spirulina, or maybe moringa? It’s like a little punch of vegetal-mineral flavor that throws the whole thing off.

Lovely apricot aftertaste though. Probably not one I would reorder, but I did enjoy sipping through my small sample size.

There are huge apricot chunks in the mix and they smell incredible. I did a quick rinse of the leaves and then steeped it up midway between the recommended times and this tea is so tasty. The oolong stays in the background and doesn’t have that mineral taste. The apricot is present and becomes more apparent as the tea cools. There’s a subtle floral flavour as the tea goes from lukewarm to cold.

The second steep is still quite flavourful as well!

1st steep 4.5 minutes
2nd steep 6 minutes

Sample from variaTEA, but originally from Roswell if I remember right. This one is actually pretty tasty tonight. I am peached out…but apricot I can get behind. While I don’t love green oolong, I am ok with them when done well with a flavour. Ie melon oolong :)

Glad to try this one as I’d consider getting it again if I had a hankering for apricot. Reminds me of one of the Paris teas I brought back but can’t for the life of me remember the name. It was an apricot black if I remember right.

Thanks ladies!

Sipdown (211)

This is very oolong today with a touch of that waxy apple flavor that a lot of apple-based tisanes have. It’s alright. But I remember the last cup being better. Thank you Roswell Strange!

Waaayyy overshot the amount of tea leaf on this cup so the oolong was especially tannic and grassy, but underneath that coarse taste and texture was a spectacular jammy apricot note just begging to be noticed and loved. If my tea leaf measurements had been better I think the combo of the floral elements of this oolong with this apricot note would have been a total winner. What happened, though, was that I just poorly under leafed a TGY gongfu session earlier in the morning so I think I was (subconciously) overcompensating in my eyeballing…

So much self sabotage with the oolongs lately!