2006 purple wild arbor Mengmao sheng pu'er

 

This is the last of a Chawang Shop order, the kind of purchase form I don't employ as often as many others seem to, often just picking up a tea here or there instead.  It's been so long since I ordered these teas I had no recollection of what this version is, and had to read every item on the order to place which I hadn't tried yet.  It's the third listed, a 2006 Ye Sheng Qiao Mu Zhuan Cha (which I think just means wild plant type wild arbor brick tea):

To be clear these are not at all typical of what the Chawang Shop sells at this point, more a look back at their sheng product theme from a half dozen years ago.  This is a random page of what they sell now (however "page 1" on the site is sorted):

That change over in theme got me started thinking about patterns in sheng pu'er demand and vendor offerings, which I'll post some long form thoughts on soon enough.  Something about that tea version had to sound interesting (beyond it not costing much, making it easy to try a few different things); let's check the listing and see what it might've been:

The Menglong TF made this 250g tea brick from ancient wild tea tree material in 2006. Purple large leaves varietal tea is from Mengmao village, Baoshan region. This place is famous for wild arbor tea (Qiao Mu). It is the optimum ecological environment for the growth of grandifoliate planted tea trees. Four years proper store in Kunming makes the tea soup golden yellow, fruity aroma and a smooth flavour. The taste resembles some sorts of laocha (old oolong tea)! The packing paper is not original packaging. Xiaguan TF also took material from Baoshan for ancient wild tea products. 

Manufacturer : Menglong Tea factory

Harvest Area : Baoshan

Production date : 2006

Weight : 250g

That does sound interesting, wild arbor, purple leaf tea.  The look is unusual, larger leaf material (so maybe an autumn harvest version?), with a mix of leaf colors showing.

Review:

First infusion:  interesting, unusual.  Some earthiness and sourness in this leans a little towards a hei cha style.  Still it has pleasant moderate bitterness, and it's relatively clean, for this being the first round, brewed a little longer than I often go to avoid saying "it's too light to tell this round."  It seems like some nice dried fruit is going to evolve in this, once some early bitterness and earthy edge wears off.  It's not challenging or edgy, or off, I just get a sense it will go from somewhat clean in effect to much cleaner over the next couple of infusions.  So I'll add more on that next round.  

I think finally this will be a tea version that I think will improve by softening some in wet and warm Bangkok conditions over the next couple of years, versus thinking most from this set would do well to experience another 4 or 5.  I thought the Laos tea was in a nice place, and the Wuliangshan brick version had a nice character for a medium level fermentation sheng.

Second infusion:  again, interesting.  There's an unusual character to this tea that I think listing out flavors and other aspects isn't really going to capture.  It partly relates to a trace of sourness; that is shifting overall effect quite a bit.  The rest is just moderately aged sheng, definitely not fully aged yet, not where 16 years stored in a more humid place would have it.  

I keep mentioning it but there's a common perception that dry storage results in sheng picking up some degree or type of sourness, which I don't find to be completely false, perhaps just a little misleading.  A moderate aspect along that line does seem to evolve into some examples I've tried, and a woody flavor, but stronger and different versions of sourness and wood flavor would come from other types of problematic storage inputs, or unfavorable starting points in tea character.

This tea is complex; there's really a lot going into the experience to unpack.  There are some warm tones, out towards wood or limited spice, and along with a hint towards dried fruit a vegetal part is more like blackberry or strawberry leaf (right, things people tend not to prepare as tisanes or ever experience).

A touch of lack of clarity (slight cloudiness) in the brewed liquid makes me reconsider what that means.  It relates to some kind of flaw, per my understanding, but I'm not sure how that gets described beyond that.  The next round brews much clearer; maybe it connects to the sourness, which will fade over the next two rounds.

unusual wet leaf color starting to become apparent

Third infusion:  it's cleaning up a little, in relation to the sourness fading,and the liquid is clear.  Bitterness and other flavor aspects are more pronounced; I think I see sourness as a particularly negative inclusion, so even a little being present stands out.  Bitterness trails a lot more in the aftertaste experience too.  

Flavors are interesting, and complex.  The dried fruit range reminds me of dried blueberry, a bit unusual.  Warm woody tone stands out a lot more, connecting with light warmer tone, and other understated vegetal range.  This might be really nice in another 4 or 5 years; I might've been wrong about that part.  It has intensity, depth, and complexity to spare but again it seems to be in an odd place for shifting over from lighter range to heavier, from bitterness, floral tones, and some limited vegetal range to dried fruit, warm earthy tones, with subtle spice tones adding depth.  I say "again" in relation to that being one main running theme in trying these other teas, in this set.  For some that would be very disappointing, but for me it's more or less what I'd hoped to experience, teas that aren't quite there for achieving aging potential yet, that I can keep trying over some years to still have some around when then do.  If it turns out dry storage robbed these teas of a lot of final potential in part I wouldn't know that, and in a sense they're interesting and pleasant now, and probably should keep improving. 

Then there's the "a cake is a sample" theme, relating to how if you try a 250 gram brick of tea a few times a year within a half dozen years it's close to gone, right when it might be at its best.  If a tea seems especially promising buying one version for the tasting process and one to drink then works best, but these teas are surely all on the way out for stock availability, so ordering them in back to back years isn't likely to work out.  Chawang Shop's selection of 15 year or so old sheng has dwindled, nothing like the crazy level of stock Yunnan Sourcing holds.  I have some of my past favorites from them as untouched spares, just not two of everything I'm trying, and I'm not sure what I would reorder from this set.

Fourth infusion:  more of the same; there are aspects to appreciate in this tea, but it's at an odd place for aging transition.  Very mild spice tones are transitioning in, and remaining sourness slowly fades, but the feel actually picked up a touch of dryness, instead of getting richer and softer.  It might evolve to a feel I tend to call sappy within a few rounds, which I use in a positive sense.

Fifth infusion:  that just turned a corner for being more pleasant; it all somehow clicks much better.  More warm spice is a nice contribution, sourness has almost entirely dropped out, bitterness is at a good level, matched by sweetness, and dryness and wood tone are quite moderate.  Dried berry is really a secondary aspect, but it adds a lot for making the rest work better together.  

I suppose this tastes like someone might expect wild arbor purple tea to taste, unusual, in ways that are very positive but also a little odd, with some range surely not matching everyone's liking.  Or who knows, maybe the whole set of aspects and overall effect wouldn't appeal to some.  But it's not at the most likely optimum for aging transition level just now, as I see it, and the character should keep changing.

Sixth infusion:  it's really nice doing a single tea tasting, not a comparison, being that much less blasted by drug-like effect at this stage.  This picks up an interesting underlying tone, a little towards the inkiness I mostly describe in relation to Wuyi Yancha.  It's all integrating even more than it had in the last round, those same aspects I described over earlier rounds "cleaning up" and working in better proportion with each other.

Seventh infusion: it's fading in intensity a little; funny how it just got to where it balanced best and will need to be stretched to keep up intensity from here on.  Fruit taste is picking up a little in the overall balance, shifting a little from dried blueberry towards grape.  It did keep brewing positive rounds after this but not so much seemed to get lost from not describing them, since it stayed more consistent past this point.

As overall impression goes this is a little unusual.  Per some general hearsay and the very few examples of purple teas that I've tried that might be normal.

Placing that tea experience:

It's easier to say that some people would love this novel tea experience, and many others wouldn't at all, than it is to place it in relation to other experiences.  I just re-tried a local Thai, wild-origin, very strange tea version that is as close to this as anything I've ever experienced, this tea, made by the Jip Eu Bangkok Chinatown shop owner Kittichai.  It was sour in a novel way, so I couldn't tell with any certainty how it would age further, although now 2 1/2 years later I have added input on that.  It might be picking up sweetness and depth but apparently it's always going to be strange, and sour.

Next one would try to guess if that's from a novel plant type input (my guess), or from an error in processing, that in these two cases they just didn't dry the tea appropriately at one processing step (which is also possible).  I've tried too many examples of "wild origin" teas to look up and list out, and some common patterns emerge, but it's a set of inconsistent patterns, not just one or two.  This Moychay Yongde wild origin sheng was one of the cooler and more pleasant sheng versions I've tried, more indicative of another pattern, of teas being flavorful, novel in flavor aspects, relatively low in bitterness and astringency, and not sour.  This Xiaguan wild origin material version (a 2005 tea reviewed in 2020, so comparable in age, if not aging / fermentation input) was a little unusual in character, but closer to standard sheng range than these three other examples.

What about the purple leaf theme?  The unusual color of the brewed leaves of this cake isn't as clear in the pictures as I noticed looking through them later on, but it's definitely not any typical sheng wet leaf color, even for aging input causing that to be a broad range that transitions from light green to light brown, with odd coloration in the middle.  I've not tried much purple leaf material tea.  There might only be two black tea versions reviewed in this blog; not much at all, and nothing relevant to this experience.  

You can't try to extrapolate any category character from one sample, regardless of which, and comparing results from one tea type to another is a bit silly, but still let's see what I though of a Farmerleaf version awhile back.  First Farmerleaf's input on what purple leaf tea is (cited in this blog review of that tea, but you would need to look it up on the Internet Archive backup page now, since Farmerleaf would've sold out years ago):

This tea comes from the Zijuan varietal, also known as purple tea. It is a cultivar selected for the high amount of anthocyanins in the tea leaves, which give the leaves its purple color. Such mutation can appear naturally in the usual assamica varietal of Yunnan, and is also more prevalent in some wild tea species.

Apart from its unusual leaf aspect, the zijuan cultivar features a very special fruity aroma, which comes out very well when the leaves are allowed to oxidize. This black tea displays this cultivar's fragrance, and is therefore quite different from the typical Yunnan Dianhong made of seed-propagated Assamica...

Then onto what I thought of that processed black tea version:

Second infusion:  It's warmer in nature, leaning a little towards a spice aspect now as well, just not clearly cinnamon or anything else.  The hint of tartness (mostly dropped out, but still present) reminds me of dried cranberry, or maybe that along with other dried fruit.  A hint of savory range is closer to sun-dried tomato, an addition that works well with the rest, integrated, and lending it complexity.  Other flavor complexity probably relates to floral tone, but it's non-distinct.

Third infusion:  warmth might have picked up, adding a little more flavor towards cocoa or cinnamon than the other floral and prior dried fruit aspects, with those others fading.  It's complex in a limited sense but it could be more complex, and flavors could be more distinct. 

It sounded nice, maybe just a little strange, not excelling in relation to complexity or flavor intensity, with novel character standing out more.  Black tea processing, the oxidation, would change how any type of leaf material comes across a lot, so that green tea or sheng pu'er processing would lead to completely different results.

That "wild" Thai sheng might be better at identifying related patterns, in terms of character and age transition, even though it wasn't really purple leaf material (as far as I know).  It's only about 10 years old now, but surely a lot more age transitioned / fermented than this 16 year old dry stored Chawang Shop / Mengmao / Menglong produced version.  

There's a lot more I could say about one aspect changing to another in relation to trying that Thai version across 3 years, or leaf color, and so on, but it seems like adding guesses on top of guesses.  Both examples are in an atypical sheng character range, and people would either tend to value that or be put off by it.  Reaction to sourness as a primary flavor aspect would potentially inform which, with that Thai version a good bit more sour.

Related to a theme mentioned here I bought an extra cake of that Thai tea so I could finish the one I've been trying over however many years that takes, and then have another to experience as an aged version.  I like it, I just wouldn't want to drink it too often.  It's a nice novelty kind of tea to have to share with friends, since they may have never tried anything like it.