Really spicy, strong character, 2016 sheng per tea from Jingmai – mountain. Long to infuse and sufficiently complex to be a partner for exceptional tea drinking.

Nanzuo village old shengtai 2016

The age of the tea plants is around 50 years old, natural tea garden. A combination of one bud and two leaves were used to make the tea.

Mrs Zhang selected the oldest natural tea gardens in her village to make this tea. She and her husband processed it in their tea factory in Nanzuo village. Located 10 km from the main village of Jingmai, the village has unique climatic conditions that are different from the rest of the Jingmai Mountains.

The leaves are long and the tea leaves are loose-textured.

A pleasant, easy-drinking tea that is halfway between everyday and festive teas. It has a sweet character, with a slight astringency that is a good vehicle for mild tobacco and fruity herbal flavours. Interestingly, the wake-up water is also sweet now, as if it were sugary. There is also a wildflower honey character in the aftertaste, I would describe it as a spicy tea.

Pressed into 357 gr discs.

Jingmai - mountain story

Mountain Jingmai is famous for its vast ancient tea gardens. But two-thirds of the cultivated area is occupied by younger plantations, known as natural tea gardens. The first plantations of this kind were planted in the Jingmai area in the 1970s. In this era, the main aim was to increase production; tea had to be cheap to be affordable for the masses.

At the time, these new plantations were seen as an improvement on the ancient tea gardens. They were chemically fertilized, protected from insects and diseases with pesticides; weeds were controlled with herbicides, and tea was harvested faster than ever before, thanks to well-pruned picking tables atop the tea trees.

At the time, Pu-erh tea was not considered an exceptional product. It was an everyday tea, blended and pressed in a few county-sized factories; only a few different tea leaves were available each year. Therefore, the rationale behind the establishment of these gardens in Jingmai was clear: to modernise tea garden management techniques, taking advantage of Jingmai's high altitude and the necessary local expertise in tea cultivation and processing. The green revolution was underway in Jingmai.

Tea grown in Jingmai's plantations was particularly fragrant and praised by the major tea factories in Menghai and Lancang. At the time, many tea plantations were flourishing in Yunnan; this was supported by a slow price rise and an increase in general domestic consumption. Between 2003 and 2007, the "Puer boom" led to an increase in tea plantation area, with each mountain wanting to produce more tea, more and more tea shop owners driving straight to the mountains and wanting a tonne of the famous Puer tea.

In 2007, the market collapsed and the tea world realised that this growth was just a brief episode in the wider history of Puer tea. The price of tea from old plants has continued to rise over the years because this raw material cannot be re-produced. Production of Puer tea in Yunnan has increased several times over the level of ten years earlier. Despite the increase in demand, tea prices have not risen; competition has been too strong in the lower-end market.

A new hope...

At that time, the local government decided to convert the traditional tea plantations of Jingmai Mountain into so-called "natural tea gardens", or Shengtai Cha Yuan in Chinese. The project aims to reduce the use of fertilizers and pesticides, reduce the density of the plantations by cutting down 4 out of 5 tea trees and planting shade trees in the tea gardens. This project was officially launched in 2010 and has been quite successful. Through local control and financial incentives, the locals have changed their techniques and since then the use of pesticides has dramatically decreased.

The natural tea gardens of Jingmai Mountain are not organic. Tea growers may spray herbicides, usually when they do not have time to mechanically kill weeds; however, spraying insecticides or fungicides requires the approval of the local government and would be done collectively. To our knowledge, pests and diseases are rare these days, so why is this?

The decision to cut down 80% of the tea trees in tea plantations may seem crazy; the aim was to make space between each tree. In a traditional tea plantation, the trees are so close together that the picking tables form a carpet. This makes the whole tea garden much more vulnerable to the spread of pests and diseases, which is why such gardens most often need chemical control. In natural tea gardens in Jingmai, the space between individual tea trees creates a buffer that slows the spread of insects.

In addition, planting shade trees and not using insecticides creates a favourable habitat for spiders. These natural predators provide additional protection against pests and diseases in tea gardens. As shade trees grow, they provide an increasing number of ecological services: limiting sunlight, regulating temperature, reducing weeds, providing firewood for cooking and tea processing, adding organic matter, pumping nutrients into the deeper soil layers and providing more comfortable conditions for tea pickers :-).

Limiting fertilizer application - only once every two years - limits growth and increases quality.

Good decision?

The impact on yields was severe, but in the current climate the trade-off was largely worth it. Low-quality tea is not saleable; Jingmai is striving for an image of excellence, and the quality of leaves from young tea gardens has improved since the new policy was introduced. The price of fresh leaves has quadrupled since 2010, and Jingmai is not struggling to sell its tea crop.