This is the first of a series of tastings for my ITMA paper about Wakoucha, Japanese black tea. It is my feeling that Japanese black tea is so complex and interesting that it could be developed into the Pinot Noir of the teaworld: complex, sometimes fickle and difficult, but capable of incredible complexity and with enormous variation. Terroir, the decisions of the winemaker but also the cultivar used have an enormous impact on what you taste. On this blog I will publish also small articles about Wakoucha, and the whole series is in English as I want importers, farmers and specialists from over the world to read with me.
Kanaya Midori Mankichi Midori Watanabe, Black tea, Le Cha-Hû-Thé
17 euro's for 100gram, bought at Le Cha-Hû-Thé, an excellent teashop in Waterloo, Belgium. Here is their website https://www.cha-hu-the.be/fr/ Drink before june 2020. This tea comes from a very isolated organic tea garden on the volcanic Island of Yakushima, one of the Osimi islands off the South coast of Kyushu, and part of the Kagoshima prefecture. Large parts of the island are UNESCO World Heritage and famour for the cedar forest that contains some of Japan's oldest trees, the yakusugi. It is said that the oldest of these is about 2300 years old. The environment is subtropical and humid, and locals say it rains 35 days a month ! It is offically Japan's wettest place. There are not so many tea gardens on the Island as the only fertile land consists of small tracts of land between the mountains and the see.
Yakushima Island is the little red dot to the South
Mr Watanabe works organic since the 90ies. His tea garden is surrounded by forest and nature and he has no farmer-neighbours, and so there is no possibility of chemical contamination. Of the 6 cultivars in his garden only Kanayamidori is used for black tea. The tea is made in a small building at a 5 minutes drive of the garden. There is a nice video about that here: https://vimeo.com/143646571 . The tea is made with a blend from first, second and third flus, and it is stocked two years before it is sold.
Mankichi Watanabe
Copyright: Marimo GmbH
Kanayamidori is a cultivar that was first registered as N°30 in 1970, but it was created in the immediate post-war years, in 1949. It is a crossing of Yabukita and Shizuoka Zairai N°6. Yabukita is Japan's most widely planted cultivar, very productive and delivering a early harvest, ideal for green tea. A Zairai is a seed-grown 'wild' tea plant. In a later blog I will say more about the difference. Kanayamidori's leaves are smaller than those of Yabukita and it handles the cold better. It is harvested 4 days after Yabukita and it is more productive.
Copyright: Marimo GmbH
Tasted 28 july 2019, a root day, it just stopped raining. 150ml, 3 gram, 2 minutes, 90°C, in a kyusu. The dry leaves are broken and fragmented, dark brown and good looking with some tip and a few stems. They smell very nice, fresh and complex with hints of caramel, sented wood and spices. The wet leaves also smell very spicy, like cinnamon, and they have a nice touch of freshness. When drinking the first thing one notices is the immediate attaque, with very clear notes of cigar box (cedar) but also of spices, and the tea is full and round without being heavy. There is a nice freshness in the finish. The taste is also very consistent and keeps well up. There is no astringency but there is certainly sweetness, and it is well structured, not cloying. A second brew was still ok but less complex, and with a strange tone not unlike the fermentation tones of a good pu'erh. Excellent and interesting tea with a nice story.
All images (and a big part of the story) come from this website http://www.watanabe-yakushima.com/. The pictures of the tea are home-made.
