Bloom Teas – Shanghai Cherry Fall
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I was a bit trepidatious about this tea because cherry flavours can be quite overwhelming. I envisaged something akin to a Tunes Cherry Throat Lozenge. Happily, this isn’t the case. In fact, cherry flavour isn’t as much in evidence at all here.
Shanghai Cherry Fall is a green Sencha-based pleasingly flowery blend that includes elderflowers and rose petals. Perhaps it is intended to taste like cherry blossoms rather than the fruit. I’ve never tasted the flowering parts of a cherry tree so I can’t be sure. Although the course of my tea based research, I have discovered that there is an annual Cherry Blossom Festival in Shanghai every spring, which is rather lovely. I am therefore choosing to believe that this tea is named after that. (Well that, or the 2000 slasher horror movie).
The mild green tea leaves and subtle flowery notes work beautifully together in Shanghai Cherry Fall tea. There’s also a hint of lychee about it. The Sencha tea used here is (obviously, given the name) a product of China. I am no kind of tea expert, but I am working on increasing my understanding of tea varieties. Which it turns out it’s one of those “the more you learn, the more you realise you don’t know”-type situations.
Sencha, the internet confidently assures me is a Japanese tea. Wikipedia makes no mention of non Japanese century varieties at all. All my Google searches for Chinese Sencha just take me to online shop selling the stuff. Yet this is the third Chinese Sencha I’ve reviewed recently. I’m a little confused about the difference. As I understand it, Japanese teas are steamed as part of their processing, whereas Chinese teas are baked. So which is it here? In my review for Bird & Blend’s Jasmine Poached Pear, I said that the Chinese Sencha “seems to be a milder more floral version of its Japanese equivalent”. I was basing that observation on Japanese Sencha teas, I’ve drunk in the past, and also – if I’m honest – trying to sound a bit clever and like someone who knows what they’re talking about.
If any tea aficionados here have a better understanding of Chinese Sencha and what makes it a Sencha rather than some other kind of green tea, I would love to hear from you. Fact me. I’m keen to learn.
Today’s featured book is The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy.
