I had no special hopes for this one – I know I’m beginning to sound like a broken record here, but this order was the first time I purchased from Lupicia without doing the full-on, in-store smelling thing, so I really just picked out things that could just as easily be a miss.
In the bag, this is a beautiful oolong – it comes out even prettier steeped, and that’s high praise indeed for a pile of wet tea leaf. It smells fantastic. I don’t even know how to describe it – I’m trying to think back to my own experiences with mirabelle plums, and I keep coming back to this cake, or this tarte, really, compact like a clafoutis but far less eggy, with plums. Their skins were a deep burgundy purple, though, not the pale gold that makes me think of mirabelles.
What really, really, really gets me here, though – and keep in mind I’m still just smelling this tea – is the presence of heavy, smooth, thick vanilla. It’s right there, at the end of the sniff, as exciting and unexpected as the return of a long-lost lover. Same thing in the cup – first a crazy, jubilant, sweetplummy fruitiness, and then the lushest of , Baby. You’re back. vanilla sips. There is definitely a floral element here, too, but I’ve had enough of Lupicia’s flavoured oolongs to place this firmly in the fruit category.
This is really quite something, a wonderful tea, but I’ve been so radically spoiled in terms of Lupicia oolongs that I don’t quite know how to grade this. If I were to change this rating in the future, though, I’m pretty sure it would be nudged upwards, rather than downwards.
[From my Lupicia order to Rome, April 2014.]
Boiling, 1 min 30.