A Bit of Wine, a Bit of Oolong

Speaking of vineyards, here are some German ones, much like the ones I once picked in to earn money for college - steep! Was it only Sunday we had a blizzard? Here it is Sunday again and we have had torrential rain and flooding. Of course, our front yard - where I want to plant!!!! still looks like Siberia, but I am encouraged by nesting sparrows, in spite of the fact that the ground in back is so soggy that the bird feeder fell over. My friend Lee is going to make me a bird feeder holder that is embedded in concrete encased in a tire and adjustable so I can get the seed above the deer's reach. And when the bears raid it in the early spring, it will just tip over instead of getting all bent. Bertie Baby, our orange Fluffernutter cat with the magnificent tail, is out in the ditch - which is running- bottoms up, tail waving in the breeze, mouth open, just in case there really is a frog there and I have been lying to him about when they'll appear. Oh well, keeps him out of trouble. Last weekend we all went for a short hop on the Cayuga Wine Trail, and tasted some truly lovely wines at the King Ferry Winery, two of which were some super Chardonnays. Today I thought I would compare The Briar Patch's Chardonnay Oolong and see if it smells and tastes anything like the wines I bought. I first rinsed the leaves with almost boiling water and then infused them for about 3 minutes. What do you know, it smells like Chardonnay and tastes like it, too. A lovely, fruity, grapey experience, but underneath is a very pleasant floral/fruity Oolong. A very nice blend. The Briar Patch is one of our local tea spots in Owego, NY, and can be reached online at http://www.owegobriarpatch.com/ Her prices are quite reasonable and you can buy in small quantities.

Autumn in the Early Spring

A church in Sorrento, Italy.


I can hear a lot of new birds in the woods and the red-bellied woodpecker finally has at least a girlfriend, if not a mate. It is supposed to rain all day and all night and where all that water will go is a mystery, as there are no ditches and the streams and rivers are full and the ground is frozen. We are only in "those d******n potholes" season and not yet into mud.







I made a discovery - if your cup is very full, you can't really smell the fragrance of your tea - it dissipates too quickly in the air. I really like the relatively tall and thin Chinese scent cups - they kind of look like a small juice glass. They do capture the aroma.







I had another interesting tea. This is Arya Clonal Exclusive Autumnal Flush '09 from Darjeeling, India via Thunderbolt Tea. Generally one thinks of Autumnal Flush teas as having a fairly high dose of muscatel grape aroma and taste. Not this one. First of all, it smelled like peanuts, yes, peanuts. I never had a tea smell like that. The brewed tea, as you might expect had a full, rounded nutty, toasty taste. Definitely different, but delightful.









I decided to clean out my teas, giving away or composting the ones I either don't like or are too old. That should take a while. I found some Bolivian Long Leaf from Simpson and Vail, which I reviewed last on Nov. 29, 2009. Then I said it was floral, astringent, vegetal. This time around, with a different year's tea, I found it to be mostly malty and tasting definitely of walnuts. It is earthy, but has a sweet edge that is very tasty and smooths out any roughness you might get from the walnuts and earth. It is always interesting to me to see how tea changes from year to year, even though I want my Prince of Wales to forever be unchanged. I guess I expect blends to be the same but tea from particular place I want to reflect that harvest's conditions.

A Tea for International Women's Day

Today is International Women's Day. Celebrate, bearing in mind that we, as well as our sisters around the world are seeing our rights eroding or about to erode. Stand up and be counted! Noone is really free until we all are free.

I was trying to figure out how many seasons of the year we really have. Summer is pretty straightforward unless it is like the one when it was 42 the end of July. Then there's Fall, but Indian summer may or may not come in there. We're okay as we slide into winter until January (February this year) when there is the January thaw. Sometime the end of February, beginning of March we have "False Spring" which segues into "pot-hole road rage" season when you hope to make it to real spring with all your tires and both axles. There can be several of these. Finally it is Spring! But then there is Mud Season and every shoe and boot we own is caked with the stuff. It finally dries out and we think we can relax but wait, there is False summer - those 90 degree days in April that ensure you only have daffodils and other pretty flowers for one swiftly done day. Finally, after all that, is Summer. You count them, I'm tired.

To celebrate Women's Day and rising temperatures, I have having some Formosa Hsinchu Baihao Oolong, aka Oriental Beauty. This comes from Aura Teas. The dry leaves don't have a lot of scent, but as the first minute long infusion brews, a distinct lemon or lime rises from the pale old gold colored cup. This very refreshing tea tastes of a fresh green salad with citrus juice poured over it. Yum!

By the second infusion, the leaves were still only partially unfurled. They are huge and a pretty brown. The tea this time tasted more of fresh salad, but with only a little citrus. I could hardly wait for the third and I was very nicely rewarded. By now the liquor was a medium and very floral smelling, to me, it was like pansies, whose scent I love. The tea had a wonderful sweet, delicate floral taste and sadly, I had to stop, but it was wonderful while it lasted.

I am officially now a happy tea camper - my order for Black Currant Loose Leaf Tea has arrived from Tea Forte and very nice it is and they were good about packaging, even

Going Wild with Oolong

Blogger thingy won't do paragraphs again

"I knew a crooked man, who lived in a crooked little house on a crooked little street" in Bacharach, Germany. The house, still in use, was built in 1368.

Our friends left early yesterday in hopes of beating the bad wether. I was going to write and tell you how early Spring was well and truly here, with rain and a lot of open ground and water in the low places. Suddenly it started to snow! It snowed. it snowed all day and it snowed all night. This morning it was not snowing, but we could not open our front door. I think there is about 18" of new snow. However, the alder twigs are turning tan and the willow twigs are turning yellow, so Spring is definitely marching forward. The pileated wood pecker (of Woody Woodpecker fame) is drumming in the woods and the mourning doves are courting, so what is a little snow?

The reports from both the Darjeeling tea fields and the Chinese is that the weather is just right for this year's crop, so barring unforseen bad wether, they are excited that this year's tea will be plentiful and good - something to truly look forward to.

There is an excellent article/interview with Nigel Mellican about sustainability over at http://.chadao.blogspot.com/ . Nigel is one one of the "tea greats" with wide, wide experience in all phases of tea, fromplant to pot. it is well worth reading.

For something shorter and "funner", go over to www.techtea.tv/tea-facts-infographic for a poster-type graphic of lots and lots of tea facts. It's a really neat idea and again, worth checking out.

For you contest mavens, Bigelow tea is having a contest until March 15th. Top prize is a $200 gift certificate for their products and there are several $75 certificates as well. just go to http://www.bigelowtea.com/ and follow directions. May we all win!

At last, the Royal Couple of the Year (Will and Kate) are now available for your persoal afternoon tea! See them at http://www.stephcupoftea.blogspot.com/ Invite them to your next tea party.

Now, let's see, which tea goes with a blizzard? Ah, yes, Wild Oolong from Life in Teacup, for the wild weather. I first washed the leaves for a few seconds with water off the boil and then brewed my first cup for about 1 minute. The leaves are a fairly bright green and the brew smells of orchids with a hint of mint. This is a new one for me with Oolongs. The liquor is a pale green-gold. The taste is a very soft floral with a great accent of Spring!!!! green.

The second infusion was about 1.5 minutes and the scent had shifted around to more predominately green with floral overtones. The taste was still floral and green. The third infusion once again had more a floral aspect with a more blended accent of the green tones. On the whole, the tea just said "refreshing, refreshing!" It made my mouth feel as though it needed more and made me feel awake and alert. All this from what is really a pretty delicate cup.

Hello Friends

I won't be writing anything again until Monday - We have company coming andthere won't be time.

See you all then,
Marlena

Invite a Baroness to Tea

More flowers - the hope of things to come!

Yesterday was a nice "lamby" day, but today is one of the "lion" days of March. So do we say March came in like a lamb or a lion? Or just confused, as all the weather this season has been? Soon we can start some seeds inside. Mostly what we know as "Peter's tomatoes", from the boss of a friend years ago. I guess we have saved them for 20 years. I think they are a Polish Paste type, very large, long and sort of slender, with heavy flesh and not many seeds. Very sweet and tomatoey, though and that is how we have saved the seeds - from the sweetest. Now we have to work on up the yield per plant.

I have gone back to the blacks because of the wind and today I am having Culinery Teas Baroness Grey. This is a pretty tea, with seems like a mix of green, brown and black leaves, which then has a blend of rose petals, blue and yellow flowers and dried orange and maybe lemon peel. It smells very much like those Russian-style teas, with the bergamot as a top note and the heaviness of the citron as the bottom.

I brewed it up the standard 3.33 miutes with water just off the boil and the heavy scent filled the room. The liquor is a lightish amber and smells heavily of dried citrus peel. The bergamot seems lost as the citrus takes over and there is some bitterness from too much pith on the peel - the white stuff right under the colored peel. This is interesting if you like Russian type teas. I found that there was alas, not enough bergamot to stand up to the citrus and it was more bitter than I find tasty. It is difficult to get flavors blended well, especially when you are dealing with heavy hitters, like dried fruit peel. I would not put milk in this.

Whoopie, WuYi

A first glimpse of Amalfi, my husband's ancestral town. Amalfitano basically means "from Amalfi"

Oh, my friends, Spring is coming! The creeks have started to run, my neighbors snowdrops are about to bloom, and I heard some birds calling this morning I haven't heard all winter! The average daily temperature is rising, the days are longer and I am a happy camper because of it.

We do have to keep a weather eye, however, as some of our very, very worst storms have been in the middle of March. One I remember, it was illegal to be on the roads for several days. Couldn't get there anyway, so it didn't matter to me.

I am a genealogist and was reading the latest issue of Family Tree Magazine, which this month is concentrating on the Civil War era. Before the war, tea was 75 cents to $2 a pound. Right after the war, when the economy was out of control, it was $20-$40 a pound. This was when people were making tops, about $2,000 a year. You can get very good teas for that price today and there aren't any of us making such little money.

This week I have gotten two of my tea magazines, both announcing the World Tea Expo. This is again in Las Vegas, June 24-26. You can find out all about it at http://www.worldteaexpo.com/ . Sadly, the 40% off on educational seminars ended Feb. 11. A bit of a disjunction in timing. I wish there was something comparable in the East.

If you like Laura Childs' books, she has a new one that has just come out, Scones and Bones. For those of you not familiar, these are cosy mysteries whose heroine owns a tea shop in Charleston, SC. The tea info is pretty good, as are the recipes in the back of the book.


On to today's brew! Again, I am fortunate in having a very good tea to sample. Hand Processed Wuyi Shui Xian from Life in Teacup hails from the Wuyi Mountains in China. It is a Heavy Roast, Grade 1, which means it is of good quality. The dry leaves have a roasty/toast smell, I brewed them for about 11/2 minutes with boiling water. The aroma came out even more. I need to say up front that generally I am not a great fan of heavy roasted Oolongs. However, I was very pleasantly surprised by this one. The roasted scent moved right on into the tea, along with some pine. There was also, some smokiness and a bit of tarriness. None of it was unpleasant or at all strong, in fact, I quite liked it. The second infusion, for about 2 minutes did away with some of the smoke and replaced it with a slight fruity aroma and taste. By the third infusion, there was more fruit and perhaps still the barest hint of pine. I wish I had had time for more, as it was so interesting to taste the development of flavors