Melon and cucumber
The cool, watery, faintly green band that marks fresh light oolong and good white tea.
Melon and cucumber sit between the fruit and vegetal bands and belong properly to neither, which is why they are one record. The character is cool, high-water, barely sweet and quick to fade — it is among the first things a lightly oxidised tea loses in storage, and its presence is a reasonable indication that a green oolong or a silver needle is fresh. Honeydew is the melon usually named; cucumber skin appears on some Taiwanese and Japanese material. The band is fragile enough that it rarely survives roasting, so its absence in a roasted tea says nothing about the tea's age.
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
Light oxidation and gentle drying keep it. It is among the earliest casualties of roasting and of warm storage, which makes it a usable freshness marker on unroasted light oolong.
A named production step reliably produces it. A statement about practice, not about chemistry.
Processing: process-withering, process-drying. Types: type-oolong-tea, type-white-tea.
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.
cool melon · cucumber · cucumber skin · fresh melon · green melon · honeydew melon · light melon · melon · melon rind
Teas whose notes resolve to this
Derived from the tasting notes on each tea, not assigned by hand.
- Bai Hao Yin Zhen (Silver Needle)
- Bai Mudan
- Bai Mudan Wang
- Cui Yu
- Da Yu Ling
- Fuding Silver Needle
- Hou Kui supreme
- Huang Jin Gui
- Junshan Yinzhen
- Liu An Gua Pian
- Mizudashi sencha
- Nepali white tea
- Que She
- Sanxia Bi Luo Chun
- Sejak
- Shan Lin Xi
- Shan Tuyet
- Shincha
- Taiping Houkui
- Vietnamese lotus tea
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.