Harvest seasons
When a leaf is picked changes what is in it, and every tea-growing country has invented its own word for saying when. This section takes the eleven terms a label is likely to carry and explains each one: what it means, when it actually happens, and what it does to the cup. Four naming traditions are being spoken at once, which is why a shelf can offer you ichibancha, first flush and pre-Qingming tea and mean roughly the same thing three times.
The tea year
Typical windows, not dates. Every one of these moves with the weather, the latitude and the year: the pages say by how much.
Chinese solar terms
Japanese pickings
The estate flushes
Winter crosses new year, so its window is drawn as two bars.
Windows fixed by the Chinese solar calendar rather than by the plant. The boundary is astronomical, which is what makes these the most precise harvest terms in tea.
Japan counts its pickings rather than naming them after seasons, which says where in the plant's year the leaf came from instead of where in the calendar.
The vocabulary of the Indian and Nepali estates, where a flush is one wave of new shoots and the year is counted in rounds.
The four ordinary seasons, used wherever a region has no finer vocabulary or the picking is no longer known precisely.
What it is
Eleven pages, one per term, grouped by the tradition that coined it. Two Chinese solar-term windows, two Japanese numbered pickings, three flushes from the Indian and Nepali estates, and the four plain calendar seasons used everywhere the local vocabulary is absent. Each page answers the same three questions in the same order, so two terms can be compared by reading the same paragraph on both.
What it does to the leaf
One mechanism explains most of what the terms are pointing at, and it is worth holding before reading any of them. A tea plant growing slowly, in cool weather and weaker light, accumulates amino acids, L-theanine chief among them, and makes relatively few catechins. Growing fast in strong summer sun it does the reverse. Amino acids read on the tongue as sweetness, brothiness and depth; catechins read as briskness and bitterness. So the picking that follows a cold dormant winter tastes sweet and costs a great deal because there is very little of it, and the picking taken in July is brisker, thinner and cheap because the bush will not stop producing it. Nearly every premium attached to a harvest term is a premium on slow growth.
How to read it on a label
The terms are not equally load-bearing. Some are legally or astronomically defined and mean something exact: Qingming and Guyu are solar terms, fixed points on a calendar that has been keeping them for two millennia. Others are estate vocabulary with real commercial force but no defining authority, which is why a Darjeeling second flush from a named garden and a supermarket box printed with the same words are not the same claim. And the four plain seasons are the weakest of all, because a spring in Kagoshima and a spring in Yunnan are two months apart. When a term seems to contradict a date, the term is usually describing the plant and the date is describing the hemisphere.
What people get wrong
The most common error is treating earlier as simply better. It is a reliable rule inside one region and one style, and it falls apart across them: Darjeeling's most prized picking is the second, not the first, and Taiwan's winter oolong is picked at the coldest and least productive moment of the year on purpose. Earlier is a proxy for slower, and slower is the thing actually being paid for. Where a later picking grows slowly too, because the season turned cold or the garden sits high enough that it never got warm, the later picking wins.
