The Harney & Sons Guide to Tea - Michael Harney [25]
Weather permitting, the plucked tea is spread on a tarp in the sunshine, where the leaves develop their jasmine, rose, and geranium aromas. The tarp is periodically folded and unfolded to sift and slightly bruise the leaves, triggering oxidation. After about half an hour, the tea leaves are transferred to large bamboo trays to wither indoors for an additional eight hours. More and more Taiwanese oolong makers air-condition their withering rooms to help reduce the leaves’ moisture content even further. The chilled air also improves the flavor by slowing down the oxidation.
Next the leaves are rolled and shaped into balls, a process far more arduous and time-consuming than the twisting of Wenshan BaoZhong (page 79) and other twisted oolongs. Makers of balled oolongs like Ali Shan drag out the rolling process over six to eight hours to deepen the floral aromas and flavors. They perform a dance perfected in China’s Fujian province by makers of Ti Guan Yin (page 86). Strong men harness the withered leaves in large canvas bags. They use one machine alone just to cinch the bags tight until they look like giant spheres of cheesecloth-bound mozzarella. The workers then slip the bags between two spring-loaded rotating disks, whose turning action forces the leaves to ball up upon themselves. Once performed by human feet, the rolling also provokes oxidation by breaking down the leaves. To slow the oxidation, after only a few minutes, the men remove the bags from between the disks, untie them, and toss the leaves into a large rotating drum. The drum resembles a very long clothes dryer, but without the heat source; as it spins the leaves like so many tiny articles of clothing, it cools and dries them. To restart the oxidation, after a few minutes more, the men return the leaves from the dryer to the canvas bags. Then they cinch them again and slip them back inside the disks of the rolling machines.
Incredibly, they repeat this process up to thirty times over the space of six to eight hours. An exhausting dance, but well worth it: At the end of the day, the leaves look like tight balls the size of peas, fully dried and only 25 percent oxidized. The tea’s extraordinary citrus scents and floral sweetness evoke fresh-bloomed gardenias and fresh-baked key lime pie.
DONG DING Frozen Peak
Made almost like Ali Shan (page 81), Dong Ding is a lovely example of a creamy, lemony oolong, slightly darker than its high-mountain brethren and slightly more restrained. Along with Wenshan BaoZhong (page 79), Dong Ding is Taiwan’s most famous and beloved oolong and most likely its first.
Tea makers have cultivated Dong Ding around the town of Luku in the foothills of Taiwan’s famous Central Mountain Range since the mid-1800s. Whether Dong Ding came before Wenshan BaoZhong is a matter of some debate. Legend has it a tea maker from Fujian province in China made the short hop across the Taiwan Strait along with a dozen tea bushes, planting them at the base of Dong Ding Mountain. Tea makers quickly adopted the rolled-ball method used in Ti Guan Yin (page 81; for the rolled-ball method, see “Ali Shan,” page 86).
While Dong Ding is grown within view of a snow-peaked mountain (hence its name), the tea is not considered a high-mountain oolong because of the mountain’s lower elevation. Nonetheless, over the last twenty years, Dong Ding makers have begun imitating the high-altitude tea-making techniques, making their tea much lighter than they once did, oxidizing and firing the leaves for much shorter times. As a result, today’s Dong Ding now resembles Ali Shan and Li Shan, but with a darker liquor and similar but more subdued floral and citrus flavors.
TI GUAN YIN Iron Goddess of Mercy
With its spun-sugar finish and refined gardenia aromas, medium-bodied Ti Guan Yin is among the most heralded oolongs in the world, and rightfully so. Ti Guan Yin comes from the area in China’s Fujian province where oolongs were first invented and may be the oldest known oolong as well