Spring
Spring is the plain name for the first picking after winter, used wherever the local vocabulary is absent or the seller is not being more specific. In most tea-growing regions it is the best harvest of the year, and it is the season the specific terms on the other pages are all different ways of naming.
- Window
- February to May, by latitude
- Vocabulary
- The plain seasons
- Growth
- Slow, on winter reserves
- Cup
- Sweeter and more aromatic
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.
Winter crosses new year, so its window is drawn as two bars.
What it is
A season rather than a defined window, which makes it the loosest term in this section and the most widely applicable. Where a Chinese green would be called mingqian or yuqian, a Japanese one ichibancha and a Darjeeling first flush, a Taiwanese oolong, a Yunnan black or a Nepali white is often simply spring tea. It is also the fallback when a tea has been through enough hands that the precise picking is no longer known.
When it happens
Anywhere from February to May depending on latitude and altitude, which is exactly the problem with the term. Spring in southern Yunnan begins in late February; spring in a high Taiwanese garden or in Uji is May. A single word covering a three-month spread across the tea world tells you where in the plant's cycle the leaf came from and almost nothing about the date.
What it does to the leaf
This is the season the whole slow-growth argument is built on. The bush comes out of dormancy and grows slowly on stored reserves in cool air and moderate light, accumulating amino acids and laying down relatively few catechins. Nearly every regional term for a prized picking is a term for some part of this window, and the reason they all command premiums is the same underlying chemistry rather than any local magic.
What it tastes like
Sweeter, more aromatic and less astringent than the same garden's later pickings, with more depth on the tongue. How that presents depends entirely on the style: in a green tea it is fresh and sweet, in a high-mountain oolong it is floral and thick, in a Yunnan black it is honeyed. The constant is the direction of the difference, not the flavour itself.
How to read it on a label
Read it as the least specific true thing a seller could have said. That is not automatically a bad sign, because plenty of regions have no finer vocabulary and plenty of honest sellers do not know the exact picking date of a tea they bought wholesale. But where a region does have a precise term and the label reaches for the generic one instead, it is worth wondering why. Spring on a Darjeeling, where first flush and second flush are standard trade words, is a conspicuous choice.
What people get wrong
Comparing spring teas across hemispheres without adjusting. A spring picking from Kenya, Malawi or Argentina is on the opposite calendar, so a tea harvested in October can be a spring tea and a perfectly good one. The other mistake is assuming spring always wins, which holds within one garden and one style and breaks the moment you cross into Darjeeling's second flush or Taiwan's winter oolong.
More in this tradition
