All photos credited to Vicu @teaproject.uy.
One of the biggest draws to tea for us at Tea Drunk is its ability to build a bridge across cultural divides and unite people. This belief was one of the founding pillars of our company and remains a major driving force behind everything we do today, more than a decade later.
While our focus is giving the Western world access to the pinnacle of tea from China's most prestigious terroirs, we believe this act of cultural connection is happening worldwide.
In February 2022, our team traveled to Misiones, Argentina, to meet the Sand family at the Alma Annette Tea Farm and teach local farmers how to improve their tea processing techniques. We coordinated with the fantastic teams at Soy Te from Mexico and Pei Chen Tea Palace from Buenos Aires. Together, we hosted a group of connoisseurs from ten countries for the experience. This trip truly exemplified the Americas coming together in the spirit of tea!
Arriving at the Sand family farm was a powerful experience; many of us had waited patiently for years through the pandemic to be next to tea trees again. Others saw tea in its plant form for the very first time.
The Sand family has an incredible story and history. We immediately felt their desire to treat tea well and their genuine passion for the trees. The farm has a variety of tea plants. Its heirloom forest of 80-year-old, trunk-style tea trees forms a tall canopy—they even call it their “cathedral of tea”—and its heirloom fields have more cultivar diversity than we've seen in one place anywhere in China. We believe this cultivar diversity is due to the mix of seeds imported when the Sand family arrived 80 years ago, rather than the Chinese terroirs established for centuries, where we more often see indigenous cultivars that are quite stable and genetically similar to one another.
The first day we arrived, so did the rains. This region had been plagued by drought for months, with fires threatening nearby nature preserves and agriculture. We all rejoiced, appreciating that the rains would help the plants on the farm, the whole region, and its natural surroundings. Climate change and drought are issues in many tea regions worldwide and significant factors in vintage quality year over year.
After we all settled in, we went straight to work. Over six days, we harvested and processed six categories of tea: green tea, yellow tea, white tea, Pu Er Sheng Cha (which we called Sheng Guarani), Wu Long, and red tea. With theory lectures, hands-on processing, and in-the-field examples, we all learned an incredible amount about the difficulties and intricacies of processing tea. Making artisanal tea is not like mass manufacturing, where they “set it and forget it” with timers and machines. This processing style requires the maker to be hands-on with the tea 24/7. Being “on tea's schedule” means being attentive enough to the tea and knowledgeable enough about the process to know when steps are complete and how to adapt to environmental changes. The persistent heat and sporadic rains created a few less-than-ideal processing days, but we learned how to adjust and adapt to make a delicious and complex final product.
There's a bright future for tea in the Southern Hemisphere, with places like Alma Annette making waves and putting themselves on the map. At the time, readers interested in a similar experience were invited to sign up for our newsletter for news about a planned spring return to Alma Annette around October.
0 comments