You heard that right: vintage is as crucial to tea as it is to wine. It makes sense when you think about it: tea is an annually harvested agricultural product, so the product should differ year over year based on many factors. In top-shelf, handcrafted teas, we find these slight differences due to vintage to be part of the excitement of the craft. Tea Drunk sources each year individually to ensure we bring in only the very finest of the season from the most prestigious terroirs and heritage farmers.
What is vintage, anyway?
At its most basic, vintage is the year in which a tea was crafted. For example, on our packaging, next to the location of the tea, you'll read “Early Spring 2021” or “Spring 2017,” etc. This information tells us which season and year a tea was harvested and made. We can learn a lot about a tea's quality from this alone. The best teas are produced during a short 10- to 15-day period. This is the caliber of tea Tea Drunk produces—all our teas are harvested during peak spring. Industrial production facilities can churn out tea into the summer months or even year-round. Knowing the season and the year is vital to understanding a tea.
Why does vintage matter?
Vintage matters because it really informs the final tea we drink. A lot more than just weather goes into what makes a vintage what it is. Below are some of the factors we consider when discussing a particular vintage and why they matter:
- Weather: Weather is often the most cited differentiator for vintage. Weather before and during tea season matters for the harvest. Did the region get the optimal amount of rain? Was it raining on the days the tea was produced? Was there a drought that year? Great tea is all about extracting the most potential from the leaves, and each year the weather before and during harvest will affect that potential. Weather also matters for tea-making. For example, humidity can make it harder to manage the moisture level in tea during fermentation, but weather that is too dry can result in tea having a strong aroma but lacking in texture and body. Drying the same Pu Er Sheng Cha leaves in one day versus two or more days will produce a huge difference in quality.
- Cultivars: Different cultivars perform differently each year. This adds another layer of complexity to the vintage of the tea. Some teas taste better in a given year because of the interplay between the weather and the unique characteristics of a cultivar.
- Craft: We can’t ignore that skill is a major factor in year-over-year changes. An unskilled tea maker is subject to nature’s mercy, while a skilled tea maker can strategize to minimize the risks caused by bad weather. This explains why prices for top-quality tea actually increase during “bad-vintage” years. This is because a smaller proportion of teas can compete in quality across multiple years. A tea maker’s ability to work with the specific weather conditions of a vintage is a huge element in Tea Drunk’s sourcing expertise. Frankly, not everyone in a top terroir is a top tea maker. Even top tea makers don’t make the best tea all the time. With all these factors considered, vintage quality is the matrix of a tea’s potential and the maker’s realization of that potential, given the numerous factors that can impact a tea’s quality. For Tea Drunk, it’s never about a single, oversimplified factor—just the right terroir, the right cultivar, or the right tea maker. Tea Drunk’s ambition is to bring you the best batch of tea from the best cultivar that the best tea maker made that season from the best terroir.
Does a tea company need to tell me what vintage the tea is?
Technically, no; it is not required for a company to disclose the vintage of the tea. But, as we mentioned before, vintage and season are both important quality markers for artisanal tea. When Tea Drunk began, one of Shunan Teng’s intentions was to insist on disclosing the vintage and terroir of all teas. Tea Drunk is a pioneer in setting this standard that more and more companies follow today.
Vintage is less important when discussing industrial-style tea, which is why its disclosure is often not expected. Larger companies will blend years and batches for consistency, just like a non-vintage wine. There's nothing inherently wrong with this practice; it's just important to differentiate the product as top-terroir sourced vs. single-origin; cultivar-distinguished vs. homogenized; and artisanally made vs. mass-produced. It’s about the alignment of information, quality, and price.
For connoisseurs with discerning palates, we find joy in tasting the nuanced differences among vintages of teas made in the same terroir by the same makers. It’s a high level of geekiness in tea, but it connects us with all the strategies and techniques that a tea maker must adopt while producing the tea—all through taste alone. It’s a beautiful way to connect with one another through our senses and memory.
The fun of vintages
One of our favorite things to do at Tea Drunk is side-by-side comparisons. They teach us so much! We love comparing vintages side by side. For example, comparing a 2020 tea with a 2021 tea from the same region or even the same producer can teach us a lot about the changes tea can go through with a change in vintage.
With ageable teas like Pu Er Sheng Cha, vintage informs us what we're drinking and how long it has been aging. Lastly, don't confuse vintage with the age of a tea tree. Tea from an 80- to 100-year-old tea tree is very different from someone trying to sell you an 80- to 100-year-old tea.
In 2022, our Tea Season Pre-Sale offered an excellent opportunity to dial in on why vintage matters. It was our best deal of the year and introduced customers to many of the new 2022 Tea Drunk teas. We were often asked why we could not announce which teas would be included until they arrived. We hope this lesson on the nuances of vintages explains more deeply why it is so essential for us to commission teas and comprehensively evaluate them each season. Having preset placeholders for teas regardless of how each tea performs in a given vintage is simply not the best practice if one truly wants the best each season has to offer. That is the Tea Drunk standard.
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