“As for tea: just boil the water, add the tea, and drink it; you should know this is all there is.”
— Sen no Rikyū
I still heat water on the stove.
A few small bubbles.
Then a steady rattle.
There is a stone in the kettle, something a tea teacher once suggested to soften the water.
Today, a traditionally roasted Dong Ding from Taiwan, harvested in 2015.
The leaves are tightly rolled, dark and dusty, with a faint smoky smell. Roly-polies, as my daughter calls them.
The first infusion is toasty, almost like toasted rice.
Closed.
Another steeping.
A little nuttiness. Something faintly tropical and ripe.
Then less taste.
More warmth and ease.
The leaves slowly open.
Tea was there long before I thought much about it.
Growing up, we drank Ceylon tea every day. Usually BOPF, broken orange pekoe fannings, brewed strong enough to take milk and sugar.
On trips back to Sri Lanka, I remember it quite sweet.
Milk powder. Coarse granulated sugar.
It was my morning drink for years.
I still make it that way sometimes.
Much later, wine had its hold on me in San Francisco, and a friend introduced me to another world of tea.
Red Blossom Tea Company in Chinatown.
I was as fascinated by the teaware as the tea. A gaiwan handled with the ease of something done thousands of times.
Pour.
Steep.
Pour again.
Until then, tea had mostly meant black tea with milk and sugar, or the occasional green or jasmine tea at a Chinese restaurant.
Then oolong.
Pu-erh.
Teaware.
Water.
Temperature.
Time.
As a grad student in Baltimore, my roommates and I refashioned the furniture.
Painted it. Reworked it. Built a living room that invited you to stay.
We sat there late into the night drinking tea, sometimes wine, playing mah-jong, arguing about foreign policy, Hitchens, Chomsky, whatever had our attention.
I don’t remember the tea.
I don’t remember the wine.
I remember the arguments.
The laughter.
The feeling that nobody needed to leave yet.
Dinner ends.
Nobody goes home.
Another place.
Another drink.
Someone proposes somewhere else.
The streets empty.
Conversation becomes serious.
Stupid.
Intimate.
Quiet.
I miss that.
The Quiet Detail
Before long, I had pulled another friend into it too.
He once bought the wrong teapot.
Left-handed.
He wasn’t.
Neither am I.
He replaced it and gave me the mistake.
These days, dinner with an old friend can begin weeks earlier with several texts and four calendars.
We find a night and hope life doesn’t interfere.
A call on the drive home.
A random FaceTime.
Months pass.
Then suddenly there you are.
There is very little catching up.
Relationships.
Marriages.
Children.
Work.
Deaths.
They know my weaknesses.
I know theirs.
Neither goes unmentioned for very long.
Not long ago, I had dinner with one of those friends.
We hadn’t seen each other in a while.
Between us, a bottle of Dhondt-Grellet Roc Solare.
The Champagne was unusual.
Ripe. Oxidative. Bruised fruit. Enough acidity to hold it together.
At first, a little closed.
Then more open.
More giving.
The conversation stayed with me.
Bottle of the Week
Dhondt-Grellet Roc Solare
Adrien Dhondt is part of a generation of growers making Champagne with more emphasis on site, texture, and the wine beneath the bubbles.
His approach has a distinctly Burgundian bent: parcel-focused wines, fermentation in Burgundian barrels, restrained sulfur, and generally very low dosage.
Roc Solare comes from the Coteaux du Sézannais, south of the Côte des Blancs, and draws on the family’s perpetual reserve, begun in 1986.
It brought to mind, in different ways, Ruppert-Leroy and Selosse.
Not because the wines taste alike.
More interesting the longer it sat in front of me.
What to Notice
Give it a wider glass.
Be patient.
Then ask yourself:
Would this still be interesting without the bubbles?
On This Tea
The Dong Ding was a Spring 2015 traditional oolong from Nantou, Taiwan.
I became curious about what “traditional” meant.
The story goes back to an older farmer, Master Su. Even his family’s Dong Ding had moved away from the more oxidized, more deeply roasted style he remembered from his youth.
By then, tastes had shifted toward greener, fresher, more floral oolongs.
Master Tsai Yizhe asked him to make the older style again.
That became this tea.
It was made to drink young or to age.
If you sit with a tea like this, resist trying to name everything in the cup.
Notice the first sip.
What remains after it leaves your tongue.
How the leaves change.
What happens in the body.
How you feel after the third cup compared with before the first.
A Short Detour
Back home, the left-handed pot is larger than I need when I am drinking alone.
But it still comes out for certain green teas and oolongs, along with teas he has mailed me over the years.
And when people come over.
The Dong Ding leaves that began as small, dusty balls now nearly fill the pot.
I pour another cup.
Until the next bottle,
Manj
P.S. A reader prompted me to write about tea. I have a feeling I’m not done with it. Is there a bottle, tea, or other drink that opened up a whole world for you? Reply and tell me.
Instagram: @le_dosage | Notes on wine, taste, and attention