World Tea Expo - Day 2: so much to savor!

Back home finally, and now have a chance to catch up on my posts. So much to savor on Day 2, I hardly know where to begin! 

As you may have gathered, I am fascinated by oolongs—and they were the subject of my talk with Donna Fellman. Was planning to attend Thomas Shu’s WTE focussed tasting of oolongs Thursday morning, but met up with people, got to talking about all manner of projects, so missed that talk.

Probably not quite the same as his workshop, but Thomas Shu’s talk at the International Tea Importers (ITI) pavilion told us a lot about oolongs. He was introduced by James Norwood Pratt, tea proselytizer extraordinaire. 

James Norwood Pratt on the left, and Thomas Shu in the middle, talking about oolongs.

And while he talked we tasted several oolongs. The last but far from least of these was (if I heard correctly) a Special Orchid oolong (Tung Ting)—flowery, fruity, honeyed, sweet. I could have sat there sniffing the aroma all day.

Had to take a picture of the tea...

So what are these projects I mentioned above? One fascinating project is happening at UC-Davis, namely the Global Tea Initiative under the leadership of Professor Katherine Burnett.  Professor Burnett is an expert on East Asian art, and came to appreciate tea as a global cultural object with local characteristics in taste and tradition. One of her big questions is how Chinese tea culture came to be transformed into such diverse “ways of tea.” As she pointed out to me, the tea pot was developed by the Chinese in the Yuan dynasty (1271–1368)*—prior to this point tea was ground to a powder like matcha and brewed directly in the cup. In the early years of the succeeding dynasty (Ming) teapots became ubiquitous in China, yet, according to Prof. Burnett, there was a considerable lag in their use elsewhere, for example in Vietnam. 

Something to ponder: was the tea available from China at that time best consumed after grinding? Certainly the bricks were beyond dry, and may have crumbled rather than yield leaf.

More about projects in a future post—meanwhile my next post will be about Day 3 at World Tea Expo 2016, and Selena Ahmed’s important talk about (among other things) the effects of the environment on tea chemistry and flavor.

* That’s the dynasty started by the Mongol chief Kublai Khan. After Kublai’s death, the empire gradually fell into disarray, with famines** and lawlessness. After the last of the Mongol emperors fled North in 1368, Han Chinese took over the empire and thus began the Ming dynasty.

** Famines were not only due to the ravages of armies, but also due to the beginnings of the Little Ice Age—cold summers began suddenly at the end of the 1200’s. The Little Ice Age lasted until around 1870, and is definitely over now!