2006 The Mandarin’s Tea Room Yiwu
My notion this morning is to eschew my usual detailed, verbosity and let fewer words and more photos represent my experience with this tea. It has instilled within me an appreciation of elegant simplicity, despite its overall complexity. This was a sample as a part of OTTI Round 5, offered by The Mandarin’s Tea Room.
Inspired by the “wabi” element of bon teavant’s post on tea table aesthetics, I found a cheap slice of petrified wood while on vacation that I am now using as my tea cup coaster.
It was a very relaxing Sunday morning at the tea table, perfect for taking in all this tea had to offer. The wet leaves opened with hot cotton, warm dryers and some bursts of intense ashy smoke. The first flavors rocked between cantaloupe and cooked strawberry and freshly smoked whitefish.
Middle steeps produced a light tartness in the vein of white cranberry flesh – but never intensely sour.
This yiwu proved dazzling in the finish, with a lovely, terse, complex bitterness holding long and giving herbal satisfaction. I enjoyed this tea’s understated, complex, and composed beauty. Wrapping up with fermented cocoa nib dryness in the throat, it was hard not to be impressed. This is my kind of sheng.
REFERENCES
The Mandarin’s Tea Room – Yiwu Mountain 400 years old tree
The Sip Tip – The Mandarins Tea Room 2006 Yiwu
April 5th, 2011 at 7:09 PM
[...] a change in locale, I settled into a fantastic session that involved the last of my sample from The Mandarin’s Tea Room 2006 Yiwu and Brian Eno’s Ambient 4: On Land on [...]