A taste from the past: 2004 Jingmai

Hi everyone, today I'm gonna brew a very special tea for you. You can check the wrapper, it's very simple, it's just a white wrapper and I'm gonna explain why. So this is a tea from 2004 from Jingmai. This is the tea that we sourced from the former mayor's family of our village, of Jingmai main village, and while tasting the tea I'm gonna tell you a bit about the history of Jingmai and why this tea might have a somewhat significant historical importance. We can first have a look at the leaves. You can see that it seems to have been very well stored, it's very clean, you don't see any trace of mold or fungi on the surface of the leaves. If you smell the tea, it has a bit of a wet storage smell, but the smell is quite faint. Well, it's probably because this tea has been aged in Jingmai for about 15-16 years and then recently the mayor's daughter decided to open a shop in Puerh city and to sell those teas. So they pressed them because it was stored mainly as maocha, as loose leaf tea, and they decided to press it in 2015 in the hope of selling them. So let's first give it a rinse. So why is it a tea of historical importance? Well, it's because 2004 was about the turning point in the Puerh tea culture and you can really make a difference between the pre-2004-2005 tea and the past 2004 teas. Post-2004 you could say it's the current era of Puerh tea production, with an emphasis on the age of the trees and the re-establishment, you could say, of those ancient tea gardens. But I'm going to talk about what happened just before that. So a long time ago, maybe before the, well let's say before the 90s-80s to make it simple, agriculture was quite traditional. So the tea gardens, most of the tea gardens in southern Vietnam were ancient tea plantations, like what you can see on Ta Trinh Duong nowadays, what we call the Gu Shu, the Gu Chai Yuan, the ancient tea gardens. So those were mainly established in forested, well it's half a forest, you kind of go into a natural forest, clear out the middle and low stage of the forest, so you cut all the small bushes, and you plant your tea. And you keep the upper layer of the ecosystem, so you keep all the high shade trees. This leads to a garden which is rich in biodiversity and which will not be very productive, you could say, which will not produce a lot every year. And so this is kind of the traditional agricultural model. And in the 80s and 90s, mainly due, you could say, to the impulse of Deng Xiaoping of modernizing China, well the local implementation of these ideals, this vision, was to modernize the tea agriculture. And for that, they kind of imitated the British model, the Indian or Sri Lankan model, which was of establishing new plantations. So it's only really from the 80s and mainly 90s on that we see massive surfaces of modern plantations being established. These plantations were first, you can find experimental ones that were planted as early as the 50s, but they were mainly small plots. At least that's what I got from the interviews in Chiang Mai, and it seems to be also the case in the Menghai area. And so from the early 90s on, they were farming mainly, they were cultivating the modern plantations. What's the difference between the ancient tea gardens and the modern plantation? Well first, the modern plantation, you get rid of the forest cover because it hinders photosynthesis due to too much shading. And of course, you're going to lose some of the ecosystem services and some of the natural fertility renewal that you could get in such agroforestal systems. And since you don't have those services, you're going to bring everything mainly through chemistry. So well, it's typically the Green Revolution model, which developed mainly in Europe in the 50s, after World War II, and which was pretty successful all over the world at increasing the yield. At that time, the food production was low and the engineers of the time were mainly focused on increasing the yield. And so in the tea areas, this model was also applied. It was seen as the modern agriculture, so it would of course produce dramatically higher yields than what you could get from the ancient tea gardens. And interestingly, at the time, they were also considered to be leaves of higher quality. And I think it's mainly because in those plantations, you can harvest higher grade material, like nice one bud one leaf or one bud two leaves. Why is that? It's mainly because of the pruning and the fertilization. So let me explain how these modern plantations were managed. So unlike the ancient tea gardens, the modern tea plantations are quite intensive in work and input. Intensive in work because you'll have a lot of work to do in your plantations for a given surface. You have to take a lot of care into growing the tea. And intensive in input because since we don't have those natural ecosystem services, we need to replace them to renew the fertility, to protect from pests, and also to make sure that the tea trees are in good shape. We need to replace that with mainly chemicals. So for example, if you manage the ancient tea gardens, basically you can only harvest twice a year when they are not very pushed. If you want to push them like it's done now in the tea gardens, in the tea mountains, because the price is high, you can harvest them probably as much as five times a year. Twice during the spring, twice during the summer, and once during autumn. But for those modern plantations, it didn't work like this. They were pruned at a low level. So you had a picking table, just like what you see in the Indian tea plantations. It means that it was much more convenient to harvest the tea because you don't need to climb on the trees or spend time looking for where the leaves are. They are all laid here on the table and you just pick, pick, pick. And since they are pruned with a flat top, all the buds will grow at the same rate, which is very convenient if you want to harvest specific grades. You prune and then you wait for some time and they will grow all together. So if you want single buds, you just come once to the garden and you can pick all the single buds. While if you go to the ancient tea gardens, you will never have one stage of development at a given time. You'll have maybe smaller buds on the top of the tree and more developed leaves, like one but three leaves at the bottom. So it will be very hard to pick a standard grade and that's why usually we don't do that. We don't pick standard grades on the ancient tea gardens. So the modern plantations are faster to harvest, but of course you need some nutrients and stuff to make the tea grow. So what do you do? You use, you can use a lot of chemical fertilizer. It's preferable to do a lot of, to spray small quantities many times a year. You get less loss that way than if you spray, if you apply the fertilizer once a year in large quantity. I'm not sure exactly how it was done, maybe it was done twice a year in Jing Mai, the fertilizer application, and I mean the fertilizer in the soil. So it's little pellets and you put them in the soil and they will degrade over time with the rain. Of course a part of it runs off, but a part of it gets in the plant. So it's kind of the, you could say the fast food of nurturing plants. You get the chemicals, you get the nutrients, especially the nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus very quickly into the plant. So that's for the soil fertilization. Then since you have a high density of plantation, you have lots of trees which are touching each other, so it makes more like a carpet than some individual trees, and you have no biodiversity, no natural predators in the field, it means that your gardens will be very sensitive to pest and disease attacks. So in that case, having a rich ecosystem allows you to be protected fairly well from from heavy pest attacks. You'll always have a lot, a little bit of pest, but it won't really destroy your tea plantation. If you don't have this cover, you will have to find other ways to protect the tea trees. At that time the most efficient way was to use pesticides directly, so insecticides directly applied on the tea trees. They could be applied either preventively or curatively. So either you, and it was probably both actually, you might want to spray a pesticide that will have a long time effect and that will protect against most pests, and maybe if you see there's an invasion of specific pests, you're gonna apply a quick acting pesticide which will have a low lifetime in the field, so it won't be protecting your field for long, but enough to destroy all the pests in your field. And then if you have disease, you can use the fungicides, so it's usually based on copper and it's aimed at destroying the cells of the fungi. By the way, having a rich ecosystem doesn't protect you that much against disease. On the opposite actually, you might get more problems with disease if you have a shaded garden because the humidity will be higher. And there aren't many ways really apart from using fungicide for treating disease. So you can try to avoid it by the design, you can dig some drains if your garden is too wet. Now fortunately, at high altitude, usually we're in sandy soil, so it doesn't retain water very well. And well, usually tea grows better in a dry field, so you might have more problems with disease if you have to grow tea in a wet environment. We don't really have that much of a problem in Chiang Mai. So in those modern plantations, you have chemical fertilizer applied in the soil to provide the tea tree with plenty of nutrients. You have pesticides which will prevent the pest from eating the tea trees. Of course, herbicides are applied usually twice a year to prevent any competition from the weeds. But it's not enough. If you do only this, your tea will be healthy, you will have very nice leaves. But what you want to do when you have an intensive plantation is harvest it as much as you can. Because the policy at the time was really to keep the farmers busy and they wouldn't need to cultivate the ancient tea gardens anymore. So actually, in lots of places, the ancient tea gardens were destroyed to establish those modern plantations on the land. And so, but you don't want to have huge surfaces of plantation either, especially because at that time, people didn't have motorbikes, the roads were in bad shape. So, well, you don't want to have your gardens too far from your village, otherwise it wouldn't be practical. So you want to maximize how much tea you can get on a given surface. And the key to do that really is to use growth promoters. So they are hormone, mainly cytokinin. It's a plant hormone which triggers the development of the plants. It just tells the plant to produce buds. And so usually, the method at the time was to harvest. And after the harvest, you spray that along with it. So it was a cocktail of growth hormones and also micronutrients. So it's like a foliar fertilization. It doesn't come from the root, it's directly applied on the leaf and get the nutrients even faster in the leaves. And so that cocktail was spread after every picking and it allowed you to pick the tea again one week after. So during that time, you could pick tea once a week, all year round if you wanted to. As long as you kept spraying that growth promoter and micronutrients on the tea, it would grow again. Now, of course, in such conditions, you will have a very high yield. So you would have maybe 50 harvests a year. But you will have a very diluted taste. And yet at that time, I guess, well, maybe people were not as much into tea as they are now. The consumption habits were different. Maybe they were more intended at making green tea. So in green tea, usually the look of the leaf is more important than the taste. And it's not a joke. It's really many people, green tea seller, told me that. And well, if the plantation is well fertilized, you will have more beautiful leaves. At least for the consumers, they will be a bit thicker and just look healthier. And if you spray pesticides, you won't have any trace of pest, of herbivory on the leaves. And that's where this tea come from. This plantation model was established in the 90s. And from the 90s to 2004, 2005, actually, the ancient tea gardens were not harvested. And as far as I know, it sells. So I got this information from interviews with the farmers in Chiang Mai. And I asked a bit around in Mohai. And it seemed to be quite a similar case. Now, there might be exceptions in the villages. But that was the big plan of the government to modernize the tea agriculture by establishing those tea plantations, modern tea plantations. And unlike in the past, where the tea would be processed maybe at home, in each farmer's home, usually hand processed in basic facilities. At that time, they decided to set up just a couple of larger processing units in each village with modern machinery. And most of the tea farmers would only pick the leaves and sell the leaves to that tea factory. That way, they thought they would achieve a higher quality. Because at the time, they considered that a lot of the problems in the tea was due to improper processing technique. Also, of course, frying tea by hand is inefficient from a work perspective. It takes a lot of time. And since those farmers were more busy than before, because they had more tea to harvest, creating those larger processing units with specialized people would both increase the quality and increase efficiency by reducing the workload on the tea pickers. And so, of course, people who get those deals tended to be the more educated, the wealthier, having more social capital people, families in the villages. And in Jingmai, maybe only three or four factories, such factories were present. And so the former mayor was running such a factory. And so this is a tea that they processed in 2004. Interestingly, at the time, the taidi, so the conventional plantation leaves, were more expensive than the gushu, than the tea from ancient tea gardens. So they would do the opposite than what they do now. At that time, in early spring, maybe they would have this opportunity to get the ancient tea gardens harvested. And since the leaves were cheaper, they would blend them in their main production of modern tea in order to decrease their cost. Of course, now, since 2004, 2005, many of the Taiwanese came to Yunnan. So in Jingmai, it was the 101 factory, the 101 tea company, who set up in Jingmai and kind of claimed all the Taipingjiang area. So I think they still currently have the title of ownership, because at the time, those ancient tea gardens had no important value. So I guess they could buy them for cheap. And it turned out, they found that the tea was selling very well, the price was increasing, and consumers were buying into that model of promoting old-growth tea from ancient tea gardens instead of pesticide-laden modern plantations. And so that's why this tea is so significant historically, because it was kind of the end of the plantation era. So all the teas you get from the 90s to 2005, they are more likely to, well, they are mostly made of plantation tea. At that time, it would be very hard to find a cake that was exclusively pressed with gushu. And I guess the earliest examples of pure gushu cakes you would find would probably be around 2003, 2004, mainly when the Taiwanese were doing that exploration. Of course, those cakes would fetch an astronomical price these days. So when I drink that kind of tea, of course, I cannot really judge it for the quality of the raw material. The raw material is very basic plantation tea, quite the same as what you can still find in some areas here, like Datugang, which is a huge area planted with Taidi, with modern plantations, still managed in the old way, just because they are in that supply chain, and they can sell their tea for very cheap. So the tea is not expensive, so they have to produce a lot, and it's a circle that's pretty hard to get out of if you don't have any, maybe, local government push for that, or if you don't have a big company coming and investing in that. But if we don't appreciate particularly this kind of tea for the raw material, I'm still sensitive to the quality of aging. And as I told you, so in the early 2000s, Chiang Mai was still very poor, and only a couple of people had a house made of brick and concrete. And the former mayor, because he had this tea factory, had actually the facilities to store tea, you could say, almost properly. And so that explains why this tea storage is so clean. You can find actually some tea, especially from 2007, so you know that the reputation of those ancient tea gardens increased from 2004 up to 2007, and at which point there was a lot of speculation, the price skyrocketed, and it fell in 2007. And it means that a lot of people had tea on their hands in 2007, and couldn't sell it. So even up to today, you can find tea from 2007 in the tea mountains. The problem is, at the time, people were not experienced in storing tea, or didn't have the facilities, and most of that tea is crap, let's say, because it turned moldy, or it wasn't stored properly. So I think when I'm judging an aged tea, really, I'm judging 80%, I would say, of its quality on the storage conditions. The tea ore also can come out in aged tea. So if you get similarly stored tea, you will make the difference between a Bulang Yiwu and a Jingmai. But again, if you take that storage into consideration, a whole layer of complexity is added. And I would say that even the storage conditions will prevail over the tea ore. So what's interesting in that tea is the fragrance. It's clearly, I would say, a wet store tea. Wet store, not in the bad sense, because, well, if you say wet store tea in Guangdong, for example, it means half-made ripe puerh, you could say. Usually, they will spray water on the tea and let some mold grow, but not to the point of making ripe puerh, and they will sell it as older than it is. That kind of what we call Shuchang, so literally wet storage, is really frowned upon. It's kind of seen as fake tea, and usually the taste is very bland. It's not as good as a Shuchang, and it's not as good as a properly stored Shengcha. So I guess it's mainly for people who don't know much about tea, or maybe for restaurants, who still want to serve their customers some aged raw puerh. Because in Guangdong, Taiwan, Hong Kong, people don't really drink young raw puerh. They see it a bit as whiskey, so you have to store it for maybe 10 years before it's being drinkable. And so that's why they developed that ripe puerh fermentation technique, and some people also developed alternative techniques like the wet storage, which of course for tea enthusiast is not interesting at all, that wet storage. So this tea, you could say it was like stored in a wet environment, but in dry conditions. So I would say if you were in Guangdong, that's what you would call Gan Can, dry storage. And it's a world away from the storage that you'd find in Kunming, and even a bit far from how I would see the tea aging in Puerh City. Puerh City is not as wet as Jingmai, so I was very pleasantly surprised to find this tea, and to get such a good storage condition in Jingmai, because of course I tried many older teas that were stored in Jingmai, but most of them were stored by individual farmers, and they they were undrinkable, or not as enjoyable as this. And so today I just had a three-hour drive, and I just brew this tea in my thermos bottle, and it was very enjoyable, especially I think because here we rarely get to drink those kind of wet environment stored teas. The locals tend to not like it, and it really gives me that Guangdong vibe, and I love that. So what to say in terms of complexity? I would say it's not a very complex tea. If you're a young Puerh tea drinker, you might be disappointed in the lack of Hui Gan. Quite a strong astringency, which is usually due to the farming techniques that I mentioned before. When you have a high yield like this, you tend to have a strong astringency that builds up in the mouth. Not much bitterness, but still that straightforwardness that's typical of Taidi Cha. But thanks to the storage conditions, you get really a very good aroma, a kind of juicy feel in the mouth, and this is not from the raw material, interestingly. It's a thickness, I think, that really builds up with aging. And you also get that Cha Qi, a Cha Qi that's different from the Gu Shu Cha Qi. It's a Cha Qi that you can only find, I think, in the old teas. It makes you very relaxed, and yeah, it's something to try. I know many people are not sensitive to the body feel, to the Cha Qi, but I personally enjoy that kind of tea very much. So this is the first aged tea that we offer on the website. We didn't offer any before, not because of a lack of interest, but simply because it's very hard to source in our area. It's very hard to source that kind of semi-wet straw teas that we like, and I'm happy to have found it. And the reason why they start selling this tea, well, it's mainly that the economy has been a bit hard. The tea sales have been quite slow in China since the start of the COVID crisis. So people who have these kinds of aged teas are usually more willing to sell them than in the past, and so that's a good opportunity that presented itself. So we grabbed that opportunity, and I hope you will be able to be interested in getting one of those cakes, because, or if you don't want a cake, at least get a sample, I would say, because it's really quite a different world, these semi-aged teas, and it's a nice alternative to those young raw poor tea. You will enjoy it, you will also learn to enjoy the tea for something different than the raw material. Okay, this kind of tea, most of the teas from 90s to 2005, it's a very basic plantation tea from intensive plantations, but there is a charm to it after so many years. And so I hope this first tea will be the beginning of a new offering, a new collection that we can give to our customers, and I'm eager to explore more in depth the world of aged tea. So I'll keep a lookout for more interesting teas like this. I'm gonna keep drinking that tea, probably with friends who will come over, so I'm gonna leave you here. Thank you for watching, and see you later. Bye-bye.