‘The Geisha’

‘The Geisha’
2017 Phoenix Oolong Dan Zhu Jiang Hua Xiang (The Fragrance of Ginger Flowers)

A beautiful young woman in tragic circumstances began to work as a geisha. She practiced to be the epitome of class, elegance and refinement. This persona could charm any man. Suggestive and flirty to a point but never beyond that. She was careful. She was what every man wanted, and eventually against her own best advice, she fell madly in love with a client and soon carried their child. The life of a geisha is never easy, the man she loved had abandoned her, perhaps to pursue bigger ambitions.

Barely able to support herself, she decided to bundle up her only child in the finest fabrics she possessed, and send her downstream on a small makeshift raft. As the child drifted through that misty morning air; from within fragrance of the fruits growing high above, and the perfume of the lush flowers along the riverbank, an ethereal figure emerged. A child of the forest took this helpless soul into shelter. A human in this spirit world is truly alien, in many ways her upbringing was unusual. As she grew older, she yearned to reunite with the humanity of which she had become a voyeur. Culture and the lives of the villagers intrigued her and in her adolescence; under the light of the moon, and against the advice of the spirits, she decided to return to the land of culinary arts, flower arrangement, and celebrations.

Upon her return to this strange place, she felt a feeling of melancholy. Return implies familiarity which she did not have, an observer is not a participant. Upon realizing this, she began to fade away. Her final moments bore witness to a grief-struck woman on the riverbank loading a small raft. With clear feelings of futility, a bouquet of osmanthus flowers, a candle, and bundle of fine fabric was offered into the night.

Tea grows from cuttings of plants called clones, and seeds. Seeds have a unique trait in that when the new plant grows, it may be slightly different from its parent. This is unpredictable, and trees with special flavors hidden away in the leaves may be left undiscovered for hundreds or thousands of years. This ‘Dan Zhu’ in the name of the tea means the tea comes from a single bush. 1 bush, on a mountain, in this case 500+ years growing there undisturbed, gathering life experience, deepening its roots into the earth, this bush was eventually found by someone interested in making tea and was collected for processing.

Before getting to the tea, the aroma of the leaf is noteworthy. At a baseline it’s floral, might a bit fruity, but more like a perfume of fruits than actual physical fruit. There is a distinct elegance to it. This tea is so clearly refined and classy, just smelling the leaf and observing the beautiful dark burgundy colors blend with purples and sandy browns is already a memorable experience. I tried my best to describe the leaf in the first paragraph.

But the tea, oh my god the tea. Good tea makes you sad. I had to write a story about a woman leaving her daughter to die in a river to describe this tea. When she let go of that boat, the torrent of emotions and immediate regret she must have felt is a good indication of the barrage of serious aromatics you get from this tea. The flavors and aromas don’t zoom by, it’s as if there is a slow moving river going through your face. Flavors go down your throat, lining your tongue with a sheet of texture I can only describe as brushed microfiber. Aromas go through your brain, to somewhere you cant understand, but you’re too busy to worry about that. Olfactory aromatics are surreal with this level of tea. In this story they were described as the mist, this dense fog carrying all these crazy floral notes and aromas of fruits like kiwi, peaches, and crushed strawberries.

The delivery of flavor is perfect, and that comes from the age of the tea bush. Younger tea bushes produce stronger but simpler flavors. They are perhaps easier to understand on a whim, but they lack the appeal to drink them over and over. This tea is so complex, I feel that this story while written with such passion and relevance to me today, might give me a total different feeling the next time I drink it.

You know — the story becomes depressing; but up until the point when the child of the forest “rescues” her, it’s only a little sad. This story reflects 3 infusions of this tea. Infusion 1, fucking crazy. Infusion 2 and 3, eh, they’re not bad. I yearned to return to infusion 1 the whole time. The flavors were still great, but the emotion is not there. I’d claim that so far in life, this is the 3rd best Phoenix Oolong I’ve ever had. It’s one I definitely plan to carry at sommerier!