Eco-Cha Tea Club: 92 - Award Winning Wenshan Baozhong Tea | Eco-Cha Teas

In this video we will be tasting and talking about batch 92 of the Ecocha Tea Club, an award-winning Wenshan Baozhong tea. Batch 92 of the Ecocha Tea Club is an award-winning Wenshan Baozhong tea from spring 2023 harvest. We are dedicated to representing Wenshan Baozhong tea pretty much annually because, number one, it's a traditionally made oolong tea that has a deep history in the tea culture here in Taiwan dating back to the 19th century. It was exported by John Dodd, the English pioneer of tea trade in Asia, starting in China and then here, India also, I believe. He was exporting it to the States and Europe in the late 1800s and that was the original Taiwan oolong that got shared with the world over 100 years ago. And so we want to continue to represent that tradition. And secondly, and equally as important at least, is that it is a fine quality tea and it's a unique tea in its tea processing methods. It's technically an oolong in the sense that it is partially oxidized, a lightly oxidized green unroasted oolong, and the distinctive character of Wenshan Baozhong comes from the fact that it's only twisted like a black tea. Most black tea is only a twisted leaf rather than a tightly rolled leaf. And there's something to that lack of compression of the leaves that preserves its cellular structure and its fibrous structure in the leaf. And the result is that it maintains a freshness that makes Wenshan Baozhong unique, especially among lightly oxidized unroasted oolong teas. Without further ado, I brewed 9.5 grams of tea in this 195, maybe 200 milliliter Gaiwan teapot. Still smells. For one minute, I didn't preheat the pot, I just put the leaves in and brewed it directly, no rinsing the leaves like a black tea since they're curled. You want to get that first hit of water on leaf. So one minute for the first brew, 50 seconds for the second brew after the pot and the leaves were moistened and heated, and then went back to one minute. First brew one minute, second brew 50 seconds, and third brew one minute again. I want to taste before I continue blabbing. So we went up as soon as our source said that he was ready to receive us. We really want to get there before any of his teas disappear because he harvests many days. It's relatively small amounts of harvest. He does most of the work himself. I think he only has one assistant. These leaves are machine harvested in the north. This is in the southeast New Taipei City area in the Pinglin District in the foothills between the Taipei Greater Metropolitan Area and the northeast coast of Yilan County. It's a really amazing community there. It's very not modernized. You're not far at all from the city and you just enter these small roads and these kind of miniature mountain ranges. It really feels like that. Very dramatic landscape but they're smaller mountains. These farms go up to about 750 meters at the highest starting at 300 meters. Our source is between 5 and 7, let's say, 500 and 700 meters elevation. So you're going through this. It hasn't developed much at all especially in the last 50 years. There's farmhouses, there's farms, and there's not much else. There's no 7-Elevens which you know everywhere else in Taiwan that has any amount of human population will have 7-Elevens, Family Marts, OK Marts, Hi Life, the convenience store, Capital of the World, it feels like here. None of that goes on up there and that's quite special. My point is that the traditional culture has been preserved and these farmers are continuing to do what they have been doing for generations with the help of some new machines and one of them being the harvesting machine because there are no pickers anymore up in that area. So they do it all by machine which has its own benefits. We've discussed that elsewhere also. The main benefit of machine harvesting is that you can choose the ideal time of day and the ideal weather. You're not scheduling a team of pickers to come weeks ahead of time and you don't know if it's going to be raining on that day and if it is and you cancel you're really jeopardizing your chances of being able to harvest your leaf growth at the right stage of maturity. These guys that use hedge clippers to harvest their tea rather than hiring pickers to do it by hand are able to choose the exact day literally and the hour of that day to pick the leaves that they determine to be the perfect maturity. That's a huge plus. It really cannot be emphasized enough. So we're in support of it and especially since it is the way to keep this tradition alive. These leaves are tumbled for less amounts of time. They're allowed to wilt for longer amounts of time. That's another Wenshan Baozhong tweak. That's just the recipe. And then they are put in the tumble heaters. They're also fried. Cao is stir-fried basically. That's what happens in the tumble heater at high temperature but to a lesser degree. They're not depleted of their moisture as much as the leaves when high mountain oolong is being made for example. So that's another slight variation in the processing. And then they are rolled very gently and spread out again and then they are dried the next day. So in the end Wenshan Baozhong is a gentle form of oxidation. More time involved. Less heavy manipulation and most obviously in the end they are only twisted and not rolled. Keeping their integrity. Maintaining freshness. That was a long-winded explanation. Let's move on to the second brew here. There's just so much zing into the fresh qualities of Baozhong and it really maintains its freshness. Why? I don't know because we can't vacuum seal these bags. It's twisted leaf tea. So this strip tea as they call it can't. It'll crush under the vacuum seal. So you can only do a very gently vacuum seal. There's a lot of well relatively there is some air in the package which theoretically affects the leaves over time. But we just tasted our last winter's tea and we couldn't tell. We didn't have any sense of it that stale quality that can be tasted in a high mountain tea. That's ironic really. So another supporting piece of evidence toward the how these leaves maintain their freshness because the their integrity is maintained. They're not the fiber in the leaf and even the cell walls is not damaged as much. It's so hard for me with this tea particularly to separate floral from herbal. Something very fresh. Everything is fresh about Wenshan Baozhong tea. And along with this fresh floral herbal vegetal profile is a thickness to the quality of the tea. It has something I feel like it's more substantial than a lot of high mountain oolong which again doesn't really make sense given this is a low elevation. It all comes down to the processing and maintaining the original qualities in the leaf and just tweaking them enough. You know it's kind of like this gourmet cuisine where you're not overdoing it in any way in the making of Wenshan Baozhong. Shiso. I taste shiso because it's this kind of you know slightly musky something aspect to a very fresh green deep herbal flavor. I want to go to arugula or rocket as they call it but it's not quite that spicy. It's more of a refined herb. I'm going to stick with shiso. That's the name I'm going to put on the herbal quality. Floral, yes. Tell me what you want to know. What flower? I'm not a florist. I don't know. All right. It has a perfumy sweet heady aspect. I've brewed these only three times. Don't stop there. You can go five times at least six times. Again this tea is amazing in both its depth of flavor and its endurance as well as its shelf life. So we're happy. Once again we like to do this with our spring batches of Wenshan Baozhong. We feel like the leaves in the spring represent the distinctly vibrant and aromatic qualities that Baozhong is known for. So we went up and we tasted a lot of teas which we were happy to do. First he had like I don't remember eight teas already brewed. He brews them in bowls and I tasted them all. It was all cold and I was like that one's different and he's like yeah. And it was some strain of tea that I had never even heard before. It's from Anshi province that he started to grow a couple years ago. That's a different story. And then there was another tea that I liked a lot and that was Taichung number 20. And that is our in-store batch of tea for this spring. And then he brewed a whole second round and he's like these are the ones I'm preparing. These are the ones I'm putting aside for competition. And they hadn't been de-stemmed yet. The stems were still on the leaves. So he's like I'm not I haven't made my final decision but these are the ones I'm going to de-stem and then I'll taste them again and I'll choose if they go into competition. And there is one out of that round of several I think five or six that we liked also. And I asked him do you have enough of this for enough to share with our tea club. And he said yeah I can enter it into competition I'll still have enough. I don't know if I'm going to enter it or not. So we waited patiently and a couple of weeks later we got the results from the competition. I asked him if he entered the batch that I chose and he said yes. And I said what happened and he said it got Youliangjiang which is the most basic award the lowest ranking award. But almost half of the entries are omitted from the competition and not given awards. So that means it's close to the top 50 percent. And we're not really fussed about what awards get received. I mean it does mean something. We're not saying that the judges are whack at all. They're quite professional and quite diligent in their work. But was it last year or two years ago we decided to share a batch of tea that was rejected from the competition because the way we were introduced to it. I've told the story a few times quickly. He brought me into his house. He said try both of these teas and there was a little bit of tea left in the bowls. Cold tea. And I tasted them and my head just kind of exploded with this amazing perfume. And he's like which one do you like. And I pointed to one kind of smirked and the one I pointed to got champion prize top award and the other one was his tea that got rejected. And I was like wow that just doesn't seem fair because they were very close. I had to like you know use my subjective sense to choose one over the other. They were not very different at all. And that was his point. And we said you have this. And he said yeah. And so we took that rejected tea and shared it with the tea club a couple of years ago because it was almost the same profile as the champion tea. Okay. I've talked a lot. I think I must be feeling the effects of this very fresh tea. I feel like my head is effervescing now. Try it out. Please tell us what you think. Leave your comments in our blog post or under our tasting video on YouTube. We'd love to hear your experience. Thanks for being with us. We'll see you next month.