Place · in Kyoto
Uji
Uji is the reference point of Japanese tea and, increasingly, a trading name rather than a farming one. Very little tea now grows inside the city itself; what Uji has is the merchant houses, the finishing and milling, and six centuries of being the standard everything else was measured against. Both of the inventions that define modern Japanese tea, sencha and gyokuro, came out of this valley.
What grows here
Tencha, which is ground into matcha, gyokuro and top-grade sencha. Most of the leaf is grown in the surrounding hill towns, Wazuka, Ujitawara and Minamiyamashiro among them, and brought into Uji to be fired, blended and milled. Of the seven famous gardens laid out here under Ashikaga patronage, one, Okunoyama, is still worked, which is about as direct a link to medieval planting as Japanese tea has.
How it is made here
Two things are done here that are done almost nowhere else at this level. Honzu shading builds the cover in layers rather than draping one sheet of black synthetic cloth: roughly ten days under reed screens, then ten more with rice straw laid over the top, ending near total darkness. It is slow, expensive and increasingly rare. And tencha, the shaded leaf, is steamed and dried without ever being rolled, then stripped of stem and vein, which is the only material a stone mill can turn into matcha. The milling is deliberately slow, since heat ruins the powder.
What to look for
'Uji tea' is a trade definition, not a place of growing. The rule the Kyoto trade body set in 2004 admits leaf from Kyoto, Nara, Shiga and Mie, provided a Kyoto firm finishes it inside Kyoto, with Kyoto-grown leaf given priority. So the name describes a supply chain and a house style rather than a hillside. Treat it as the beginning of the question: which town did the leaf grow in, which cultivar, was the shading honzu or cloth and what year was it picked. Grade words like ceremonial answer none of that and are not Japanese terms at all.
How it got here
By tradition the monk Myoe established gardens here in the thirteenth century. Uji began as the challenger rather than the standard: the medieval tasting contests treated Toganoo tea as honcha, the true tea, and Uji's as hicha, everything else, and it took a century of improvement before Uji took the title for itself. Ashikaga patronage laid out the seven famous gardens, and under the Tokugawa the shogunate's tea jars went from here to Edo in an annual procession, formalised in 1633 and run until 1867. Nagatani Soen invented steamed and rolled sencha nearby in 1738, and in 1835 an Edo tea merchant applied Uji's shaded tencha leaf to that method and got gyokuro.
Other places in Kyoto
- Wazuka
- Joyo
- Kyotanabe
- Minamiyamashiro
- Ujitawara