2006 Yongde "Ziyu Shengtai Gushu"

Autumn is becoming offensively beautiful. It's making it hard to get work done. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you:

I have a fairweather, on-and-off relationship with this tea. First of all, we need to unpick the (very informative) vendor description a wee bit...

This is sold as "2006 Yongde Organic Mangfei" at Yunnan Sourcing, and I apparently bought this for $18 back in Spring. The factory is indeed Yongde, and this is their "Zidu" [purple jade] brand - shown by the pseudo-classical logo at the top of the cake.

Down the left-hand side of the wrapper, the dreaded "shengtai gushu cha" [ecologically-grown, ancient-tree tea]. Though it sports the ubiquitous ATI organic logo, I remain healthily skeptical given the inexpensive nature of this cake. Though it could feasibly be shengtai, I strongly suspect that the gushu content of this cake is not unadjacent to zero.

The rather appalling (apologies!) photograph above attempts to show that this is a high-compression bing (but not too high), while the leaves are generally of a decent size. The blend contains both tips and huangpian [thin yellow leaves, often manually removed].

This cake is a bit of an enigma. I get a different tea each time I sit down with it. First time out, I loved it and bought a cake. On revisits, I have been less impressed - certainly thoughts of potentially buying more have been dispelled. I understand that Scott rather likes this one himself.

We have sticky fruitiness in both aroma and flavour, delivered in a yellow-orange soup. I usually term these "broad and low" characteristics: straw, beaniness, some mushroom. It rings nicely in the throat.

It does have a lot of crisp, clean energy - but it also brews up as rough as a Frenchman's stubble in later infusions, which is surely indication of its mostly-plantation status.

I don't recommend this tea - but it's a close call. The fruity aspects are appealing, and it has some decent punch delivered courtesy of some strong acidity in the finish, but it is ultimately simple and a bit rough.

I haven't come across any other Yongde Factory products, primarily because there are no samples available for them, and I refuse to consider buying blindly. The lack of samples reminds me a little of when film producers refuse to show a pre-release of their film to critics - I get the impression that the quality of the film is lower than usual, and a pre-sample might adversely affect the number of folk that went to see it in the cinema.

An interesting factoid from the Yunnan Sourcing product description: Yongde County is in Lincang, and is apparently where Xiaguan used to get their leaves. High mountains, tall trees, big sky. I think I'd like it in Yongde.

(Notes added to 2005 Mengku Chengguan "Qingchengfeng".)