Place · in Taitung
Luye
Luye is the home of Red Oolong, and it is unusual among tea places in being able to name the year. The style was worked out at the tea research station's Taitung branch, which sits in this township, and put into local growers' hands from 2008. Luye is a raised terrace of flat farmland on the western side of the rift valley, low, hot and about as far from Taiwan's high mountain trade as the island allows, and its tea exists because somebody decided to make a virtue of that instead of an apology.
What grows here
Red Oolong first, then ordinary ball-rolled oolong from Jin Xuan, Qing Xin and Cui Yu, and honey-fragrance teas off leaf the leafhoppers have worked over, which the heat down here encourages. None of it is high mountain tea and none of it is sold as such. The township markets its output collectively as Fu Lu cha, which is a local umbrella name rather than a style, so it tells you where the tea is from and nothing about how it was made.
The ground
The Luye terrace, a bench of flat open ground above the valley floor with the Central Mountain Range behind it, a few hundred metres up and warm the year round. Bright, exposed and subtropical, with heavy summer rain and typhoons arriving off the Pacific. None of that makes a delicate tea. It makes thick, tough leaf on a long growing season, which is exactly what a heavily oxidised style wants. The same terrace hosts Taiwan's summer balloon festival, so a good deal of the tea here is sold to visitors standing in the field it grew in.
How it is made here
Red Oolong is a local answer to a local problem. The leaf is withered and tossed like an oolong, but oxidation is pushed well past normal oolong levels and close to what a black tea takes, then it is ball-rolled in the Taiwanese way and roasted. The result keeps the rolled shape and the long run of infusions of an oolong while tasting of dark fruit, honey and caramel. It was designed to be robust, which means it forgives rough brewing in a way high mountain oolong does not.
What to look for
Red Oolong is a processing style and it is made outside the township now, so the name on its own is not provenance. What Luye has is a producer certification mark, run by the local cooperative with the township office, requiring the leaf to be grown in Luye and to test clear of pesticide residue. That is the one check here worth asking for by name. Otherwise judge the oxidation: a good Red Oolong is dark, glossy and fruity with no green edge and no thinness, while a lazy one is merely sweet and flat.
How it got here
Taitung had no famous tea and no altitude to sell, so the state built it one. The government tea research station's Taitung branch developed Red Oolong specifically to get value out of lowland summer leaf, and the style reached growers here from 2008, which makes it the newest Taiwanese tea with a name of its own by several decades. It travelled out of the township quickly, which is both the measure of how well it worked and the reason Luye needed a certification mark to say which of it is actually local.
Other places in Taitung
- Taimali