Leather and tobacco
The dry aged band — leather, cured tobacco leaf, old paper — that marks long-stored dark and black tea.
Leather, tobacco and old-book notes appear on well-aged sheng, on aged Liu Bao, and on some robust black teas. They are dry rather than sweet, and they sit where the wood band shades into something animal. The tobacco reference is to cured leaf rather than to smoke, which is a distinction worth keeping since smoky and tobacco-like get used interchangeably and are different characters with different causes. The band is small in this catalogue — six usages across three strings — which is a fair reflection of how much genuinely old tea any catalogue contains.
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
Long dry storage. The band develops slowly and is one of the markers buyers use to judge whether a cake has been stored dry rather than humid.
A named production step reliably produces it. A statement about practice, not about chemistry.
Processing: process-ageing, processing-warehouse-cycle. Types: type-dark-tea.
Not to be confused with
- Smoke (Aroma) — Smoke from actual burning material — deliberate in Lapsang Souchong and in Tibetan brick tea, accidental everywhere else.
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.
faint tobacco · leather · old books
Teas whose notes resolve to this
Derived from the tasting notes on each tea, not assigned by hand.
- Argentine black tea
- Irish Breakfast
- Kenyan black tea
- Liu Bao
- Rwandan black tea
- Scottish Breakfast
- Turkish çay
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.