The last two of the six fragrances in the Rare Teas Collection* are perhaps the oddest. Today I’m going to talk about the one based on pu’erh, and tomorrow the one based on Yunnan Golden Needle Tea. The reason they are odd is that the perfumers chose some curious ingredients, that can be expected to shift the aromas expected from the teas.
Midnight Black Tea – Pu’erh with vanilla, guaiac wood and labdanum
Just as with the Oolong perfume, we have to ask which pu’erh did the perfumers choose. Pu’erh comes in two main types: raw and ripened. Both types are made from the broad leaf assamica variety of Camilla sinensis, and for both older as well as younger leaves are picked. The main difference between the two types of pu’erh lies in their handling.
Raw pu’erh is treated so that initial enzymatic activity due to bruising of the leaves (with the formation of polyphenols) is only partially inhibited, unlike what is done with Chinese green tea. The resulting “maocha” is aged at room temperature, usually in a compressed form, for a matter of years during which time fermentation occurs and the unique aroma profile of each tea develops.
Ripened pu’erh was designed to shorten the time to readiness of the tea, and involves allowing the maocha to ferment in a warm humid space for about 2 months, where the leaves are turned, dampened, and piled up again repeatedly, much like compost. Once the tea has fermented, it is. ready for compressing and aging
As you can imagine, there are important differences in the chemistry of these two types, differences so important in fact that the authors of a very recent paper could successfully distinguish between the two types using an “electronic nose.” ** The main differences they found can be divided into two sets.
The first set has to do with compounds that activate the cool/cold receptors. Raw pu-ehr has 8 times more linalool than does ripened, and also more beta-cyclocitral, which has a minty smell, and safranal, which is green/herbaceous and sweet.
The second set consists of methoxyphenolic compounds—in fact the methods used by the authors could distinguish between the two types of tea based on these compounds alone, with ripened pu’erh having several fold higher levels than raw. And what is the smell of these compounds, you ask? Stale stale stale. Not a smell that you would like in your perfume. In fact people often allow ripened pu’erh to air out for a while to allow these compounds to dissipate before brewing their tea.
Given these differences, it is likely that the perfumers who created Midnight Black Tea used a raw pu’erh in their formulation, but may have missed the opportunity to create a fresher scent (at least for top notes) by not picking up on the compounds in the tea that reach the cool/cold receptors. Or maybe they didn't want that possibility. The rest of the formulation suggests that they didn't.
The exquisite flower of the Cistus ladaniferus plant, from
http://www.biolandes.com/images/p-ciste-labdanum-espagne6grand.jpg
Labdanum, a resin from the Cistus ladaniferus shrub is a substitute for forbidden ambergris from sperm whales, because it has a tenacious, musky odor. Interestingly, both forms of pu’erh have a significant amount of dihydroactinidiolide, a compound with a musky smell, so tea and labdanum together would shift the aromas to the more warm side of the temperature spectrum. In perfumery, labdanum is frequently combined with vanilla to give a sweet (in my opinion, cloying) aroma—it is combined with vanilla in this perfume as well.
Guaiac wood also falls into the category of warm, sweet smells with a woody, earthy quality. Pu’erh contains a compound, beta-guaiene, which (as you may have guessed from its name) was first isolated from guaiac wood, and which has a woody, balsamic aroma. The perfumers were probably aiming to enhance that aspect of the pu’erh by adding guaiac wood to the mix.
The result, I imagine, is a perfume heavy with lingering odors, with little if any of the lighter floral and minty aspects of raw pu’erh—a sweet warm musky smell, in other words, often characterized as “oriental” or “amber.”
* http://worldteanews.com/profiles-new-products/tea-perfume-for-the-true-enthusiast?NL=WTM-001&Issue=WTM-001_20160412_WTM-001_244&sfvc4enews=42&cl=article_4_b
** Jing Ye, Wenguang Wang, Chitang Ho, Jun Li, Xiaoyu Guo, Mingbo Zhao, Yong Jiang, and Pengfei Tu. Differentiation of two types of pu-erh teas by using an electronic nose and ultrasound-assisted extraction-dispersive liquid–liquid microextraction-gas chromatography-mass spectrometry. Anal. Methods, 2016, 8, 593-604.
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