Journal
Year 1 — Learning to See. A short note, most weeks, on landscape, tea, people, and time.
July 20, 2026
China
Before we taste the tea, we look at the mountain.
Before anything else, we look at where the tea comes from — the mountain decides more than the tasting cup ever will.
Before we taste the tea, we look at the mountain.
We check what grows around it, how steep the slopes are, where the water runs, and how much sun and shade a garden actually gets through the day. None of this shows up on a label. All of it shows up in the cup.
Two gardens a short walk apart can behave completely differently once you look closely at the ground beneath them. One sits on a shaded, north-facing slope that stays cool most of the day. The other catches full sun from mid-morning onward. One has thin, rocky soil that drains fast; the other holds water for days after rain. None of this shows up if you only ever taste the finished tea, far from where it grew — but it was there all along, shaping the plant long before anyone picked a single leaf.
A tasting can tell you what a tea is. A mountain tells you why — and whether that "why" is something we can count on again next year, or something that happened once, by accident.