The Harney & Sons Guide to Tea - Michael Harney [19]
As Matsuda’s tea leaves have more amino acids and sugars than most, his tea’s aromas and flavors are also more luscious, intense, rounded, and sweet. He enhances those qualities at each step in the tea making. After carefully plucking his leaves with small, handheld hedge trimmers, Matsuda lets them wither for a very short period on a tarp, where they acquire the lemony, vegetal aromatic compounds called “linalools” and “hexanols.” Then he fixes his teas for the traditional time of thirty seconds, keeping his leaves more whole. (Deep-steamed, or fukamushi, Senchas get sixty to ninety seconds and fall apart into smaller filaments, creating a more assertive but less nuanced tea.) To further preserve the teas’ aromas, Matsuda rolls the leaves firmly but not excessively, giving them a duller finish than most Japanese Senchas, which are ordinarily shiny and polished from heavier rolling. Finally, Matsuda fires the tea lightly in an oven, creating a slight roasted or toasty aroma layered over the lemony, lush flavors of the leaves. The result is an exquisite, almost pastoral Sencha. Like a classic Barolo, Matsuda’s Sencha is structured and refined, its vegetal base notes reined in by high fresh lemon and roasted flavors.
KAKEGAWA ICHIBAN SENCHA
This bracing, lemony tea is an assertive example of a popular modern style of Japanese green tea, fukamushi Ichiban Sencha. Unlike the previous Sencha made exclusively by Yoshihiro Matsuda, Kakegawa Ichiban Sencha is actually a blend of teas grown from the same area, Shizuoka, located a few hours east of Uji. Ichiban means “the first,” indicating the tea was produced from the first, most tender leaves harvested at the beginning of May.
Uji produces Japan’s very finest teas but accounts for only 3 percent of the country’s total production. Today, close to 50 percent of Japan’s teas come from a fertile wedge on the coastal hills south of the city of Shizuoka, in the shadows of Mount Fuji, about an hour south of Tokyo.
The hills surrounding Kakegawa are covered with tea plants, perfectly manicured rows of green. The area is so dominated by tea production that one hill has a tea bush topiary trimmed in the shape of the Japanese character for tea. The tea operations here are among the most sophisticated in the world. The hills are outfitted with a network of huge metal fans that protect the tea from frost (the fans keep the cold air from settling low near the leaves, where they could kill the young tender shoots). The tea factories are spread out every couple of miles throughout the region, all ready to process the harvest quickly.
Kakegawan tea makers first developed the fukamushi style of Sencha that I described in the introduction to this chapter. The fukamushi method of deep steaming was invented after World War II to improve the quality of tea mass-produced from larger, poorer leaves. While lasting only thirty seconds longer than traditional steaming, deep steaming breaks up the leaves into much smaller filaments, allowing for a stronger and quicker brew. Compared with the refined, polished, almost pastoral quality of Matsuda’s Sencha, Kakegawa Ichiban Sencha has all the punch and intensity of Tokyo at rush hour. The Japanese have so come to enjoy the flavors of fukamushi Sencha that almost all Sencha in Japan today is deep-steamed.
KAGOSHIMA SENCHA
This lively, vegetal, but high-pitched tea is a vivid illustration of a good-quality blended Sencha. Kagoshima is a port city on the southern tip on Japan’s Kyushu island, the second largest tea-producing area in Japan after Shizuoka. Kyushu is also the southernmost tea-producing area in Japan. Spring comes earlier here than to the rest of Japan’s tea regions, so Kyushu brings Japan its first spring teas. The island’s large, flat plateau allows for Japan’s biggest tea farms. The farms are vast and flat enough to accommodate an unusual harvesting system: