What is Wild Tea? Tasting An Ancient Tea Variety

Hey teaheads! This is Don from Mei Leaf. What is wild tea? You may have heard the term wild tea being bandied around by tea sellers, or by producers, but what does that actually mean? Well, I'm here to give you my impression of what wild tea means, and to taste this Ye Sheng, which means wild-growing, Hong Cha. So it's a black tea from Yunnan province. This is my first 10-step tasting of this tea. I'm excited to get stuck in. But first of all, let's talk about the concept of wild tea. I don't want to cast any aspersions to sellers out there that are using that term, but I think it's important that we try to define what that possibly means. In my experience, wild tea can mean a few different things. The first is that they're talking about the cultivar, the variety of the tea tree used to make the tea. If that variety is an old, heirloom variety that is not a cultivated variety that has been hybridized and sort of messed with, with asexual propagation, then sometimes that is called wild tea. Secondly, we're talking about the ecosystem in which the plant, or the tea tree, is growing. If that ecosystem is very natural, very varied, very complex, then sometimes that's termed wilder tea. And the third is kind of related to the second, but it's related to how managed the tea forest, or plantation, is. Obviously, if it's a very managed plantation then you can't really call it wild. And, you know, wild tea is often sought after, and it's often talked about from way back when, even in Lu Yu's Classics of Tea, that famous encyclopedia of tea. He wrote that wild tea is always preferable to garden tea. But when we talk about wild tea I think that it conjures up these images of sort of intrepid explorers just hacking through, with machetes, forests, and then suddenly finding themselves in this lost tea forest where there's these wild tea plants growing, and then they pick it and they produce this tea. In my experience, that is not the case. When you go to these wilder plantations, or forests they're not plantations, they're forests, you do feel like it's very natural. You feel that it's very varied, and you feel like you are walking in a real, natural, wild forest. But, in my experience, I've never found a tea which comes from forests which are completely unmanaged forests. They always have some management. So it may be that they are just sort of hacking back the weeds occasionally, or they are looking after their tea trees, tending them, by making sure that there's sort of... maybe they're making sure there's shade plants nearby, etc. So there's some management involved. So I think that the idea of completely wild tea that comes from untouched tea trees that have been suddenly happened upon by these tea explorers, I mean, that may have been the case previously, but I don't think that that's the case now. I'm happy to be proven wrong. Oftentimes, we hear that if you leave a tea forest almost unmanaged, it's never completely unmanaged, but almost unmanaged, that doesn't produce the highest quality tea. You want to have some management of the forest, some control, looking at the topsoil, looking at the variation, looking at the shade, looking at all of these different factors which will affect the growth, and the health, and the flavor of the tea that it produces. The second factor that we talked about was the variation in ecosystem, and that really is, I think, one of the key aspects here. Wild tea, for me, has to come from forests where there is a great variation in the plants, and therefore the animals, and all the way down to the microbes in that forest, in that micro-ecosystem. That really makes a big difference to the flavor of tea, in my opinion, and we're going to be talking about the reasons for that in a little bit. And then going back to the first factor, which is the variety itself, the cultivar, I do think that you can't really call your tea wild if it comes from asexually-propagated young tea trees that have been planted within a more varied ecosystem. I don't think that that counts as wild growing. But this all a matter of opinion, and as I said, I'm not trying to cast aspersions to tea sellers that may have a different opinion about what constitutes the term wild. So, why does tea coming from heirloom varieties, which are theoretically, or should be, older tea trees, growing in more varied ecosystems with management, but management just to sort of maintain the health of the ecosystem so that the tea tree can flourish, why does that tea taste different, and we're going to be tasting this tea to see how different it is, compared with less wild tea? And it is a spectrum. You can't just say there's wild and garden. There's a spectrum in between. And I think that the key to the reason is that the aromatic compounds, molecules, terpenes, these volatiles, some less volatile, some more volatile, that contribute to flavor and aroma, mostly come from secondary metabolites, defensive compounds that the tea plant, just like all plants, develop in their arsenal to protect themselves. So, imagine that a tea plant is by bugs. When it's bitten by bugs it releases chemicals, aromatic chemicals, beautiful aromas, to try to repel those insects. And then that tea tree stores that information. So if you have a tea plant which is growing in a wilder environment, with a varied ecosystem, you've got many more factors that are affecting, and influencing, the experience that the tea tree has growing in this forest. If you have that same tea plant, but growing in a garden where it's basically totally managed, and the only surrounding plants are other tea trees, and maybe a few little fruit trees and shrubs everywhere, then obviously the variation in terms of the experience that the tea plant is having is going to be much, much less, and therefore the plant is not going to be forced into producing all of these incredible aromatics that it uses to defend, and attract, and interact with its environment. And the age of the tea tree has a big factor in this as well, because the older the tea tree the more experience the tea tree has had, and therefore if a tea tree is only, let's say, 30 years old then it may have never experienced a drought, or a flood, or it may have never experienced very hot or very cold weather, and therefore it has not been required to make the relevant compounds, aromatic compounds, to defend itself from these environments. Whereas if a tea tree is 100 years old, in the case of this, 100 plus years old, then it has had many more years of experience, and therefore is more likely to have experienced lots of different adverse, climatic, perhaps also pests have infested during those 100 years. So lots more experience, and therefore it's built up character, and that character can be tasted, because it has produced all of these compounds, these aromatics, and those aromatics, once they've been produced by the plant, they tend to be stored in the memory. So the plant stores them as glycosides, so it locks them with sugars and keeps them in the cell, and when there's a new attack, or there's a similar adverse event happens, then those terpenes can then be released. So the plant, whilst having the same genetic makeup from the beginning, let's say you took the same genetics, the older tea tree is going to have more aromatic profile, or a more complex aromatic profile, because of its character, which is built up over experience. And I think that this is also true for the fact that if you have heirloom varieties that have been growing wild, predating sort of all of the cultivation of tea, so very sort of old heirloom varieties that are very much accustomed to growing within this natural terroir, this natural environment, then I do think, and I'm not certain of this, but I do think that the information that is built up over the lifetime of the plants, over many successive generations, does mean that the actual seeds that are produced are going to carry within it the codes to produce more of these terpenes and aromatics. Again, feel free to chime in if you've got more expertise than I do. And therefore, wild tea trees, meaning heirloom, meaning older, meaning growing in a varied ecosystem, and having a managed system that contributes to that varied complexity, will have greater breadth and complexity of aromatics. What I have in front of me is Ye Sheng Hong Cha. I don't have a name for this tea yet. We're going to do this 10-step tasting, and from that hopefully I'll get some inspiration for the name for it. This is from the De Hong En Sis variety. So it's a variety which is a Da Ye Zhong variety, so a big-leaf variety, but it predates the very broad Da Ye Zhong Assamica variety, which is very commonly found all over Yunnan, of which there are many, many different sub-varieties. So we're not going to get into that complexity, but it's worth noting that this is different from the main variety which is used to make Puerh tea, and Dian Hong black teas from Yunnan. This is a purple-sprouting variety, which means that it has purple-tinged leaves. Specifically, that purple comes from anthocyanins, which we believe is used by the plant to protect itself from UV radiation. So again, clearly learned behavior through protecting itself through maybe going through experiences of very, very hot weather, very, very burning sun with very intense UV, the plant genetically is programmed to sprout anthocyanin-tinged, purple-tinged leaves. So you'll hear about purple tea, and this is a purple tea tree, De Hong En Sis. It usually comes from De Hong, or is often found in De Hong, and a lot of the tea that you find that's purple tea, it may be black tea, it may be Puerh tea, is from De Hong, which is in the Lin Sang area, but further west. This is from Feng Qing. So this is from Lin Sang as well, so north area of Yunnan, but is from this very, very famous, probably the most famous, village area in Yunnan to produce Dian Hong. Dian Hong just means Yunnan black tea. So Dian is a shortened way of saying Yunnan, and Hong is red. So in China they call black tea red tea. So Yunnan red, we call it Yunnan black. So Yunnan black tea from Feng Qing, and I've tasted many De Hong Yue Sheng black tea. Yue Sheng means wild-growing, but is often attributed to this De Hong En Sis primeval tea variety, this purple-sprouting variety. I've tasted a lot of it from De Hong, and I've never purchased it because I've felt that whilst it has a very, very interesting flavor profile, full of crazy terps, and if you've tried purple bud, which is the lateral ancillary buds from the De Hong En Sis, we've got that in stock, you'll know that it is a crazy, amazing, like pine-filled, wild-tasting, wild-forest-tasting tea. I've tasted a lot of it from De Hong, but it has the incredible breadth of terps, but it doesn't have enough of a depth of body for me, and a roundness, so we've never selected it. But this tea was sent to us, and this comes from Feng Qing, as I said. So let's quickly scope the tea. This is season April 2020. This is the cultivar, this old De Hong En Sis purple-sprouting variety of Assamica. The origin is from Feng Qing in Lin Sang in Yunnan China. The picking and processing, this is made with bud and two leaves, and the processing is going to be the same as all Yunnan black teas. So it's going to go through a rolling phase, and then that oxidation phase in piles, and the elevation is around 1,400 meters. So this tea from Feng Qing, when it arrived I was very much taken aback by... Ooh, let me just warm up this flute brewer. I was very much taken aback, not just by the terpene level, or the aromatic level, which was nuts, and I'm hoping that it's going to be the same when I taste it now, but also that it had a roundness to it which I really think works very well, and offsets against that. You can see the leaves. Maybe you can see that it has a more slightly purple tinge to it, compared with a lot of black teas that you may have experience with. So I've just put that water in the bottom. That just heats it up. It's a nice trick with the flute brewer. You can just sort of keep the heat going. Right, here we go. Let's have a smell of this, as yet unnamed, Ye Sheng wild-growing purple tea from Feng Qing. And instantly you know you're dealing with a completely different variety, and a completely different style of tea, compared to any other Yunnan Dian Hong that you will have experienced. This is so bright. It's so fruity. It has lots of grapefruit zest. Slightly dry grapefruit, like baked grapefruit, but it's very zesty. I'm getting hops, which has terpenes that are the same. It's grapefruit terpenes and hops terpenes. They're the same molecule. There are the same molecule in both of those plants. I'm also getting a little bit of dried mango. Again, similar terpenes. Mersin is in hops, and is in mango, and it might be in grapefruit. So there's an intense terp. It hits the nose of hops, grapefruit, mango, blackcurrant. But then there's also a touch of cocoa in there. Not a lot, but it's there. That's the rounded note that I'm talking about. And a touch of malt, and a little bit of spice as well. What is that spice? Hmm. I'm not quite sure. When I wet the leaf we're going to get an explosion of terps, because what's happening is the water is displacing all of these volatile terps, and now they're just allowing themselves to be set free. Elephant. It's going to get the first taste of this Ye Sheng. Okay. Oh, I can smell it already. The smell of these terps is intense. Oh my gosh! If you've ever traveled to Asia, and you may have, especially if it's really hot, there's this isotonic sports drink in Asia. I think it's a Japanese sports drink. It's called Pocari Sweat. Those of you who know will know. Pocari Sweat has that grapefruit flavoring, and it really reminds me of that. Pocari Sweat, but I'm also getting some cherry, so it's moving a little bit deeper. I'm also getting that cocoa amped up as well. A touch of wood pine, so on the fresher end of the wood spectrum. Oh, and that spice. It's like ginger. I think it's ginger, but again, dried ginger rather than fresh ginger, and there's something orangey there. But it's not orange. I would say that it is coriander seed. Coriander seed has quite a lot of a citrusy orange note to it. Now I'm going to be brewing this. I'm going to start... I advise you to experiment with this, because this is my first proper 10-step tasting. I'm sort of going to be feeling it out. I'm going to go with 95 degree water. I'm going to suspect that if you push it to hotter than that you're going to start to bring out the natural Yisheng bitterness that comes from this heirloom variety, but it might not be the case. Certainly, 90 degrees will bring out a lot of the fruit, but it might impact the body. So I'm going to start at 95 degrees and see how we go. This is how I recommend everybody handles their tea. We can supply you with brewing recommendations, but ultimately you've got to experiment and find the right level that meets your personal taste, because this is always a balancing act going on. All right, here we go into our flute brewer. I didn't measure the amount of leaves, but you can sort of see that it's the right amount for this flute brewer. I love brewing in the flute brewer. For this moment, when you see the leaf extracting, there is no other way that you get this with Gong Fu brewing. Yeah, small glass pots potentially, but there's something lovely about this vertical nature. You really see it very, very clearly. Mouth is watering. Look at that beautiful golden liquor. As I pull this flute brewer up you're going to see the liquor darken. I think that's probably enough for my first infusion. There you go. So it's quite golden, quite malty-looking, isn't it? If I saw that I would sort of think it was going to be a more classic Dian Hong, quite golden. It doesn't really have a purple tinge. Let me see if I can get that a little bit closer. Yeah, there's a slight sort of redness to it, a pinky sort of hue to it, that is showing that it is from a purple variety. Okay, Ye Sheng Hong Cha from Feng Qing. Very important. There is, in my opinion, a difference between this and the black tea that comes from De Hong. Cheers everybody. Oh, turps! Right up my nose. I mean, just without... In fact, there are very few teas that will give you this level of an aromatic information from the liquor. Oh, wow! I'm getting a lot of turps. I'm getting all of those light grapefruit notes, but I'm also getting deep brown sugar, steamed brown sugar cakes that they have in Dim Sum. Ah! Malt, toffee. So in that mouth-watering Yunnan Dian Hong spectrum. But I expect that when I drink it I'm going to be tasting a lot of other different, more wild, terp notes. Mmm! Yeah. So the mouthfeel, or the texture, is as you would expect with a Ye Sheng. It's not going to be as thick as with a more standard, I say that in inverted commas, Dai Ye Zhong in Yunnan. So it's medium to... Yeah, medium to medium. Refreshing, quenching, super fruity. The cherries are still there. I'm getting that ginger. I'm getting the grapefruit. I'm getting that orange note that I was talking about before, the coriander seeds. Now it has moved more into orange, but again, not fresh, like baked, as if you've taken thin slices of a blood orange, and you've put them in the oven, and just baked them off like a lovely cocktail garnish. So it's got the slight bitterness. 95 degrees is perfect for me. The bitterness is perfectly pronounced. It's there just to remind you that this is a Ye Sheng, but it's still really enjoyable. Much more like a sort of cocktail-like bitterness. In fact, this really reminds me, the orange and sort of Angostura bitters combo, really reminds me of a Negroni. Yeah, baked orange, those adult bitters, and that brown sugar note that I was talking about before, that brown sugar cake, has now shifted into a rum. So like an aged rum, dark rum. The wood note is there, so you can throw that in as well. So cask, aged rum, Negroni, orange, but then you still have the high notes. And the high notes, actually, I'm getting a slight muscatel. So dessert wine reminds me a little bit of an oriental beauty, eastern beauty. Again, that flavor profile tends to be more reserved for the bug-bitten teas, so it could be, potentially, related to the experience of the tea tree experiencing pests in this wilder ecosystem, and therefore having to make sure that it can generate and produce the hotrianol, and the other terpenes, the citronella, and all of these terpenes which contribute to this muscatel, sweet, honeyed muscatel note. And that hoppiness is still there. In fact, that little hit of bitterness really reminds me of hops. It reminds me of an IPA. It reminds me of a craft beer. Yes, in fact, that is probably the more accurate descriptor here. If you would imagine that a classic Yunnan Dian Hong would be more in the sort of ales, you know, a little bit more softer, warmer, maltier. This reminds me of those more hoppy, more grapefruit, naturally, from the hops. That more grapefruity note that comes from craft beers, IPAs. I would be fascinated to know the crossovers of the terps between IPA beers, hops, and this tea, because there seems to be a lot of a crossover there. If you like your craft beers then you're probably going to really enjoy this tea. But it's not too much. It's not like one of those smack-you-around-the-mouth, hoppy experiences that you can get with some of these craft beers. It's very, very much understated, and you're just getting this lovely, aromatic zestiness from the grapefruit. A little bit of black currant as well, which again shares terpenes. I can't remember the terpene, or the molecule, but I think there is at least one, maybe a few, different molecules that are in black currants, and in hops, and sounds gross, but is also in cat pee. In their pee. I don't know why I'm going off on this subject, but I've started, so I'll finish. So, and the urine of the cats is relatively benign in terms of the smell, but once the compounds that are in the urine, intentionally, by the cat, they know that there's going to be a time release as the microbes that are in the natural environment start to break down these special compounds. They release these aromatics, so you get this time release of aromatics. It means you can mark your territory, etc. And these compounds, I think it's called cat ketone, but there are more scientific names for it. They exist in cat pee. They exist in black currants. I think they exist in wines, like Sauvignon Blanc. So you can often hear the descriptor, cat pee, for the more brave tasters out there. We'll use that as a descriptor for certain wines, and I believe there's a whole host of other plants, edible fruits, and foodstuffs that have this molecule. And it's there, this little... How would you describe it? It's very difficult to describe it. It's like a tang, a little tang of black currant, and yeah, if you've had fresh black currants you know what I mean. And black currants are also rich in anthocyanin, so there may be some crossovers with the purple. You know, you could dive deep into this if you wanted to explore this further. I would love to have the time to do that, of course, but there's very little time to do these things. All right, this kettle has gone up to 100 degrees, so we're going to test it on our second infusion, and we're going to brew at boiling point, just to see what we've got going on here. Elephant moves along. This is the second infusion. Mmm! Such an interesting tea. Yeah, it reminds me of that tang that you get with Sauvignon Blanc wines. So we're in the sort of alcoholic, without it being fermented, we're in the Negroni's, Sauvignon Blanc's, we're in the IPA's. Fascinating tea, and that is a combination of the fact that it is from an heirloom interesting variety, this De Hong Ensis variety, which has had a lot of character and experience. I like to think of it in the sense of like human beings. You know, the more character, the more adverse events that we go through in our lives, the more character we develop. Not in terms of aromatics, of course, but in terms of other character traits. So, what was I saying? Going off track. Yes, so this wild taste is to do with the heirloom variety, but also to do with the fact that this tea comes from 100 year old plus tea trees. So, you know, definitely Da Shu, potentially moving into the Gu Shu territories, and comes from very, very complex, natural ecosystems around Feng Qing village. Cheers everybody, infusion number two, at boiling point. Let's see what that bitterness is doing. Very slightly more bitterness, but still really, really enjoyable. Nowhere near, as I said, those hoppy IPA's, but moving a little bit more into that territory. Texture has thickened up a bit, so hotter water is going to bring out a little bit more of a richer extraction. Therefore, you're going to get a little bit more texture, but it's still, I would say, in the medium zone, and it's still a very refreshing tea. Picking up those notes of muscatel. Picking up notes that are more in the rounded, malty, toffee-like notes of a Feng Qing. So I suspect that if you brew this tea cooler you're going to bring out more of those top notes, more of the brighter grapefruit's black currents, and the hotter you brew you're going to make it a bit more warmer, rounder, and thicker. That's my suspicion. I'm going to test it out. I've just lifted the lid on my kettle so I can bring this down to just under 90 degrees, and we're going to try the third infusion at a cooler temperature. It's very important that you experiment like this, you know? You'll get to have a personal relationship with the tea, rather than just using a stopwatch and just following advice. Oh no! Don't heat up. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Switch off. It's at 89 degrees now, so that's perfect. It's going to bump up a little bit, but that should be fine. Mmm. Mmm. The finish on the mouth, dry at the back of the tongue, moving to a gentle, not a flooding juiciness, not one of those teas that hits you with a lot of juiciness, but it has, again, that sugary note that we were talking about earlier. It reminds me just of sugarcane. Like, it has a very lovely, sweet, simple, sweet sugarcane sweetness in the mouth. A very comfortable, sweet feeling, slightly cooling on the tongue. It's going to be interesting to know the body sensation on this, because while the growing tea plants that are older tend to be stronger. So we'll see. Again, because of complexity that's built up through character, through the ecosystem, the age, and the heirloom variety. All right. Quickly, this is hot, so I can't drink this too quickly, but I want to smell the empty cup and see what's going on there. Mmm. Yeah, that's hot. Okay, let's pour this away. Let's smell the empty cup. Again, I'm expecting it to be warmer, on the warmer side of the spectrum. It tends to be the case. Yeah. Ginger coming through, and caramel. Ginger chews. Ginger caramel. Oh, ginger caramel. Oh, that's a lovely smell. I wasn't expecting to be so in love with that smell, but that is... I love ginger caramels. For those of you who have visited our tea house you may know Coco Loco, which is a ginger caramel and coconut in sort of a crazy mix that we make fresh for people when they order, bashing up ginger, and this reminds me of that. But it also has that malty and slightly fruity note, and hoppy note, again, of an IPA. As it cools it reminds me of the smell... Wow! It reminds me of the smell of smelling an empty sort of beer glass, when the beer is sort of... You know, you've finished your beer and it's sitting there, or you're picking up a load of glasses of beer, and you get that whiff where it's just concentrated down, and it's become a little bit warmer. Wow! Amazing. IPA. I'm trying to think, how can I somehow slide that into the name of the tea without it causing confusion? All right. Elephant gets a special treat, and gets the second infusion. You can see it turning gold, because it's still very, very hot. But I want to do one more infusion with 90 degree water. Let's quickly check. 89 is still here. So this is going to give me an idea of what a slightly cooler brew is going to do. Body sensation starting to feel it. Drinking on an empty stomach, as usual. It's early here in London, and I can feel it in my stomach. It's not like some intense churning sensation, but it's there. I would be very interested to find out the entourage effects of this tea, knowing that it has that mango note that I'm continually picking up. That means it's rich in myrcene. That hoppy note and mango note means it's rich in myrcene. Myrcene means it could be a good candidate for entourage effects, for those who know. Right. Here we go. This could be a nice Friday night tea for me. Mmm! It still maintains that zestiness, even at boiling point. Let's see. A slightly cooler water. Mmm! Big difference. Big difference. Slightly thinner, but really, really refreshing. I would imagine, just like a beer, this would really work well with a little wedge of lemon. I know, sacrilege, but it could work very well cold-brewed, or flash-chilled preferably. I think flash-chilled would be better, with some lemon. I think that the flavor profiles, or maybe even some grapefruit, would work really, really well. This, I think, is quite a versatile, refreshing tea, and certainly has tons and tons of fascinating terpenes, from the grapefruits, and the black currants, and the muscatel, and the cat pea Sauvignon Blanc arena, down to the malts, and the toffees, and the brown sugar cakes, and all of that. And then this lovely structure that comes from that hoppy, slightly bitter note that is a very well-known characteristic of wild Ye Sheng purple-sprouting tea trees. I'm starting to feel the effects of this tea. I think that it has quite a strong energy to it. It should, given its age and its wilder-growing origins. It feels, from my instinctive reading, like it's not excessively energizing. It's sort of a mellow, but quite buzzy tea. We'll find out. I'm going to go through my 10-step tasting, and you'll see all of the tasting notes, and the body effects, on the website, plus, hopefully, a name by then. So that's my definition of wild tea. Please let me know what wild tea means to you in the comments section below. That's it teaheads. Check out our other videos, taste our teas wherever you are in the world by browsing Mei Leaf dot com, and come visit us if you're ever in London. Other than that, I'm Don from Mei Leaf. Thank you for being a part of the revelation of true tea. Stay away from those teabags, keep drinking the bad tea. Bye.