How nature expresses itself in our teas.

Terroir expresses the way the geography, geology and climate of a particular place affects the taste of that place’s agricultural products, be it wine or tea.

To put it simply, if one day you happened to convince a tea master to produce the same type of tea from the same cultivars but from bushes grown in a neighbouring village, you would undoubtedly taste, smell and see a difference in the final product.

This makes each single origin tea unique, and virtually irreproducible in another region. At Jade Tea, we like to call this Nature's signature on tea.  

In Taiwan, the same cultivar grown on a particular mountain is said to have a different “sense of place” (Shan-qi) to any other, simply because teas “absorb” the environment in which they were grown.

Some very experienced local tasters can distinguish the mountains of origin by sampling the tea, however, one would have to drink a lot of tea from that region to discern the relationship...