Tea Information:
Leaf Type: White
Where to Buy: Adagio
Tea Description:
Sweet apricots, peach, lavender and white tea entangle themselves for a delicate fruit and floral tryst. Quietly pleasing, like softly whispered confessions of admiration that keep you wanting more.
Learn more about this tea here.
Taster’s Review:
This is a white tea from Adagio’s Love Petals collection. It’s a fruit-floral blend, containing sunflower petals and lavender buds on the floral side, and apricot and peach on the fruit side. The base tea is a white peony, composed mostly of brown-black stalks and leaves, but with a few downy silver buds in evidence. It’s not the best looking white peony I’ve ever seen, but appearances can be deceptive.
I used 1 tsp of leaf for my cup, and gave it 2.5 minutes in water cooled to around 180 degrees. The resulting liquor is a medium golden-yellow, and the scent is mildly fruity. To taste, the fruit is the primary flavour, and the floral ingredients are mostly absent. I was hoping this would be the case, as (with a few rare exceptions) fruit/floral combinations usually strike me as rather odd. The main flavour I can detect is peach, and it’s a reasonably natural tasting approximation – mildly sweet, with that pulpiness that ripe peaches have. The apricot is present a little, but it’s definitely second fiddle here. As peach and apricot are reasonably similar flavours, however, it hardly seems to matter.
Although I can see lavender buds in the dry mix, they actually make no impact on the overall flavour, or at least not that I can discern. I imagine the sunflower petals are being used to carry the fruit flavours, so perhaps that explains their role in this blend. The white base is also strangely absent from the flavour of this blend. I usually find it possible to detect white teas in flavoured blends, particularly white peony as it can be quite thick tasting, with a floral/dusty flavour all its own. Not so here, which is another point in this blend’s flavour. The peach and apricot are allowed to shine, and shine they do!
This makes for a pleasant blend on a warm spring day, and I can imagine it would also work well iced. Adagio did well with this one.
