Bringing consciousness to tasting, not just in the sensory experience of the mouth or intellect, but also in the body. Sometimes these approaches face each other: the very Western sommelier side, especially French, and the very experiential Chinese approach.
In our Tea Discovery series, we make our acquaintance with Argentinian powdered tea, resulting from experiments by farmer Mario Paredes. “Tea plantations were being destroyed because black tea had stopped being profitable. Matcha caught our attention, because we saw it as one of the healthiest drinks in the world,” he says.
Knowledge of how tea is grown and processed came naturally to fourth-generation Argentine grower Carolina Okulovich but she observed that was not so for the tourists and visitors to the farm who found tea cultivation and processing fascinating. That was how the idea arose to create a learning experience for visitors touring the 15 hectares known as La Ruta del Té.
Uniquely positioned in the southern hemisphere where the harvest will soon be underway, Argentina is one of the world’s great tea producing nations. The first few months of the November 2019 harvest were very rainy. Growers report achieving normal volumes of good quality black tea for export.
The harvest is just beginning in Argentina, the southernmost tea growing region in the world. This year November temperatures were unusually cool at the beginning of spring in the Southern Hemisphere.