Ziya Mountain Tea is a native Taiwanese tea tree variety, named for the delicate purple tint on its young buds. While making oolong tea from Ziya Mountain Tea results in a heavy bitterness and astringency, crafting it into black tea brings out delightful fruity and woody notes. As a result, its cultivation around SunMoon Lake has grown steadily in recent years. Aside from TTES No. 18 and Assam, Ziya Mountain Tea is now one of the highest-yielding tea varieties in the local area.
Characteristics of Ziya Mountain Tea
The defining feature of Ziya Mountain Tea is that its young buds display a delicate purple color. This hue fades as the leaves mature, typically turning green by the third leaf. Additional traits include thick leaves, sturdy stems, and a strong tendency to produce tea seeds.
As a native Taiwanese tea variety, it has been cultivated for a long time. However, mainstream Taiwanese teas are partially fermented, and Ziya Wild Mountain Tea produced a bitter and strong taste when made into partially fermented tea, so it was largely ignored and undervalued in the early days. After 2000, with the rise of black tea in the SunMoon Lake area, it was discovered that Ziya Wild Mountain Tea has a ripe fruit aroma characteristic when made into black tea, especially the Ziya portion harvested in summer which carries a wonderful woody fragrance. It began to gain popularity around 2010, and by 2020, it had become one of the four major black tea tree varieties in SunMoon Lake.
Origin of Ziya Wild Mountain Tea
Currently, the Yuchi Township area around SunMoon Lake in Nantou is the largest producing region. Aside from SunMoon Lake, major tea regions in Nantou, the Alishan tea region, and Pinglin in New Taipei City also cultivate it, mostly for black tea production. Yuchi Township holds an annual black tea competition which features a Taiwan Wild Mountain Tea category, where top-award-winning Ziya Wild Mountain Tea black tea can command a price of NT$100,000 per 600 g.
The Best Ziya Wild Mountain Tea Black Tea
Ziya Wild Mountain Tea can be harvested from March to September, but like other black teas, the quality is best from May to August. Teas harvested in other months have a lighter flavor with less prominent varietal characteristics, making them more suitable for blending. Ziya Wild Mountain Tea made into black tea between May and August offers the best astringency and woody aroma. The “Ziya Wild Mountain Tea Honey Black Tea,” bitten by tea jassids, features a unique flavor profile and is truly a masterpiece of black tea.