Dried fruit
Longan, date and raisin — the dark, concentrated sweetness of aged and heavily oxidised tea, and a Chinese descriptor with no English equivalent.
Dried longan is among the most-used single notes in this catalogue and it is worth pausing on, because it is a case where the Chinese vocabulary is more precise than the English one. Gui yuan xiang — dried longan fragrance — is a standard descriptor for well-made Fujian black tea and for aged white tea, and English-language tasting notes that render it as 'dried fruit' or 'raisin' are reaching for the nearest available referent rather than translating. Longan is sweeter and less sharp than raisin, with a slightly smoky, resinous edge that comes from the traditional practice of drying the fruit over fire. The band as a whole — longan, jujube date, raisin, persimmon, generic cooked and stewed fruit — marks tea that has been fully oxidised, aged, or both, and it is what a white tea turns into over years in storage.
Which sense this is
Aroma. Volatile compounds, smelled through the nose or retronasally while drinking. Nearly all descriptive tea vocabulary is here, including words people say they can taste.
Compound descriptor. A familiar thing used as shorthand for a mixture of sensations. Nobody detects 'chestnut' — they recognise it.
Where it comes from
- Processing step
Full oxidation, and ageing on top of it. The band deepens with both, which is why a five-year-old white tea and a fresh Fujian black tea can end up in the same descriptive territory by different routes.
A named production step reliably produces it. A statement about practice, not about chemistry.
Processing: process-oxidation, process-ageing. Types: type-black-tea, type-white-tea.
Not to be confused with
- Orchard fruit (Aroma) — Apricot, peach, plum, pear and apple — the temperate fruit band, and the commonest fruit note in oxidised tea.
What gets said that is not right
That 'dried longan' is an exotic way of saying raisin. It is a specific and standard Chinese descriptor for a particular kind of dark sweetness, and the fruit it names is fire-dried, which is part of the reference.
The phrases this covers
Editors write tasting notes in their own words. These are the exact phrases in the catalogue that this descriptor accounts for — the mapping is authored phrase by phrase, so nothing is grouped by a rule that guessed.
baked persimmon · cooked fruit · cut fruit · dark fruit · date · dried date · dried fruit · dried jujube · dried longan · raisin · red fruit · ripe fruit · stewed fruit
Teas whose notes resolve to this
Derived from the tasting notes on each tea, not assigned by hand.
- Aged GABA oolong
- Aged Gong Mei
- Aged Liu Bao
- Aged Shou Mei
- Aged white tea cake
- Anamalai tea
- Anhua dark tea
- Assam
- Assam golden tips
- Assam second flush
- Ba Xian
- Balhyocha
- Chen Xiang Tie Guan Yin
- CTC black tea
- Darjeeling autumn flush
- Dian Hong
- Gong Ting shou pu-erh
- Gu Shu black tea
- Guifei oolong
- Hand-pressed Fu Zhuan
- Hong Shui oolong
- Hua Juan Cha
- Hua Zhuan
- Irish Breakfast
- Kenyan black tea
- Kenyan orthodox black tea
- Lao Cha Tou
- Lao Cong Shui Xian
- Lapsang Souchong
- Light-fermented shou pu-erh
- Liu Bao
- Malawi black tea
- Menghai shou pu-erh
- Mi Xiang black tea
- Moonlight White
- Muzha Tie Guan Yin
- Myanmar black tea
- Nilgiri
- Ning Hong
- Nong Xiang Tie Guan Yin (roasted)
- Orthodox black tea
- Qian Liang Cha
- Ruhuna
- Russian Caravan
- Rwandan black tea
- Samovar blend
- Shou Mei
- Shou pu-erh (ripe)
- Shou pu-erh brick
- Sun Moon Lake Assam
- Tan Bei oolong
- Tanyang Gongfu
- Tian Jian
- Tuocha
- Wai Shan Xiao Zhong
- Wayanad tea
- Wuyi rock tea (yancha)
- Yiwu sheng pu-erh
- Yunnan green tea
- Zheng Shan Xiao Zhong (unsmoked)
- Zheng Yan yancha
Nearby
A tasting note is a comparison, not a measurement. Where the route from leaf to sensation is established it is labelled as such above; where it is not, the page says so rather than supplying a mechanism the descriptor has not earned. See the rest of the vocabulary for how the axes divide up.