Region · in Japan
Kyoto
Kyoto grows a small fraction of Japan's tea and sets the standard for a great deal of it. Shading, tencha and the whole apparatus behind matcha were worked out in the Uji valley, and sencha was invented a few kilometres away. What Kyoto sells now is partly leaf and largely continuity: the same towns, the same merchant houses and the same reference point that the rest of the country is measured against.
What grows here
The shaded teas, first and foremost: tencha, which is ground into matcha, and gyokuro, along with high-grade sencha. The prefecture's actual growing happens in the hill towns south of the city, Wazuka, Ujitawara, Minamiyamashiro and Kyotanabe among them, rather than in Uji itself, which has very little planted land left and functions as the trading and finishing centre instead.
The ground
The Uji river basin and the valleys feeding it produce heavy morning fog, cool nights and a wide day-to-night swing, which slows growth and is the classic explanation for the region's aroma. The slopes are steep and the plots small, so much of the picking is still done by hand or with two-person machines, and the terraced hillsides at Wazuka look nothing like the flat mechanised fields of Kagoshima. Shading then does the rest of the work.
The bushes
Kyoto is where the shading cultivars live. Asahi, Samidori and Ujihikari were picked out of the local Uji zairai, the seed-grown native population, which is why they are called the Uji cultivars; Gokou came later out of the prefecture's own tea research station. All were chosen for how they respond to weeks under cover rather than for yield, and Gokou in particular is unpleasant grown in the open and transformed by shade. Yabukita is present as it is everywhere, but a serious Uji tea will usually name something else, and single-cultivar matcha is one of the few reliable signals of care in a category full of vague grades.
Harvest seasons
Tencha and gyokuro are first-flush work and nothing else, picked in May after roughly twenty days under cover for gyokuro and longer again for tencha. The shade goes on in stages and deepens as the harvest approaches, ending near total darkness, so the covering calendar is set backwards from the intended picking date rather than the other way round. Paying for those weeks of cover, and then for one careful picking off ground too steep to machine, is why a second flush is almost never shaded here.
How it is made here
Tencha is the local invention and the thing that separates Kyoto from every other prefecture: the shaded leaf is steamed and then dried in a purpose-built brick oven without ever being rolled, then stripped of stem and vein, leaving only flat leaf flesh. Nothing else can be stone-milled into matcha. The division of labour is the other half of it. The hill towns grow the leaf and make the tencha, but the granite mills and the blending sit with the merchant houses in Uji and Kyoto city, so the name on a Kyoto matcha is usually a miller and blender rather than a grower.
What to look for
'Uji tea' is a trade definition rather than a place of growing: the Kyoto industry's own rule lets leaf from Nara, Shiga or Mie carry the name so long as a Kyoto firm finishes it inside Kyoto. That is not fraud, but it does mean the useful questions sit underneath the name. Which town did the leaf grow in, which cultivar, was the shading honzu (reed screens and straw) or a synthetic cloth and what year was it picked. Wazuka, Ujitawara and Minamiyamashiro increasingly sell under their own names, and a tea that names its town is telling you something 'Uji' cannot.
How it got here
By tradition the monk Myoe established the first gardens in the area in the thirteenth century. Uji did not start at the top: in the medieval tasting contests it was the tea of Toganoo, in the hills north of the city, that counted as honcha, the true tea, and Uji's was hicha, everything else. Uji caught up over the following century and the labels swapped. Under the Tokugawa the shogunate's tea jars were carried from here to Edo in an annual procession, formalised in 1633 and kept up until the shogunate fell. Nagatani Soen's steamed and rolled sencha came out of this district in 1738.