Orchard fruit
Apricot, peach, plum, pear and apple — the temperate fruit band, and the commonest fruit note in oxidised tea.
Stone and pome fruit notes appear across the catalogue wherever leaf has been oxidised gently: Oriental Beauty, Darjeeling second flush, good Fujian black tea, aged white tea. The band spans fresh (green apple, ripe peach) through cooked (baked apple, stewed plum) to dried (dried apricot, prune), and the catalogue authors that range as modifiers on the fruit rather than as separate notes, which is exactly the grammar this crosswalk exists to make visible. The cooked and dried end travels with oxidation and with age; the fresh end sits on lighter teas and fades first in storage. One thing worth saying about the vocabulary: 'stewed' as a modifier here means jammy and cooked and is a compliment. It is a different word from the stewed fault, which is what happens to green tea in boiling water, and the two are deliberately not mapped together.
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
Gentle, complete oxidation is the usual route. Fruit notes are among the first things lost when oxidation is rushed or the leaf is fired hard.
A named production step reliably produces it. A statement about practice, not about chemistry.
Processing: process-oxidation, processing-controlled-oxidation. Types: type-black-tea, type-oolong-tea.
- Processing step
Ageing moves the band from fresh towards cooked and dried, which is a large part of what people mean when they say an aged white tea has gone from hay to fruit.
A named production step reliably produces it. A statement about practice, not about chemistry.
Processing: process-ageing. Types: type-white-tea.
Not to be confused with
- Stewed (Aroma) — The dull, cooked, slightly sulphurous note of green tea made with water that was too hot or left too long.
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.
apricot · baked apple · baked pear · dried apricot · dried plum · faint stone fruit · green apple · green fruit · light apricot · peach · peach skin · pickled plum · plum · plum skin · prune · red plum · ripe apricot · ripe peach · ripe pear · ripe stone fruit · sour plum · stewed apple · stewed apricot · stewed plum · stone fruit
Teas whose notes resolve to this
Derived from the tasting notes on each tea, not assigned by hand.
- Aged Baozhong
- Aged GABA oolong
- Assam clonal
- Awabancha
- Azores tea
- Bailin Gongfu
- Bailin Jin Hao
- Ban Tian Yao
- Bi Luo Chun
- Bulang sheng pu-erh
- Chen Xiang Tie Guan Yin
- Da Hong Pao
- Darjeeling muscatel
- Darjeeling second flush
- Dong Ding
- Fushou Shan
- GABA oolong
- Goishicha
- Guangdong Da Ye Qing
- Gui Hua Wulong
- Gui Hua Xiang
- Guifei oolong
- Hong Shui Dong Ding
- Hong Shui oolong
- Jin Jun Mei
- Jiu Qu Hong Mei
- Kangra tea
- Keemun
- Keemun Hao Ya
- Kenyan purple tea
- Li Shan
- Ling Tou Dan Cong
- Mi Lan Xiang Dan Cong
- Mi Xiang oolong
- Moonlight White
- Muzha Tie Guan Yin
- Nilgiri frost tea
- Oriental Beauty
- Phoenix Dan Cong
- Phongsaly ancient tree tea
- Pressed white tea cake
- Qing Xiang Tie Guan Yin
- Rou Gui
- Sheng maocha
- Sheng pu-erh (raw)
- Shou Mei
- Shui Jin Gui
- Song Zhong Dan Cong
- Vale do Ribeira tea
- Wakoucha
- Wuyi Mei Zhan
- Xing Ren Xiang Dan Cong
- Ye Sheng black tea
- Yunnan Bai Hao black
- Yunnan Golden Bud
- Yunnan silver needle
- Zhenghe Silver Needle
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.