The des Sages

This is a very perfumed tea and its aroma evokes being at a busy, bustling perfume counter where a bunch of youthful girl scouts are spraying the air with all kinds of different and not necessarily complementary scents. Trying to deconstruct the riot of flavours and aromas is not easy.

Perhaps this tea is too much of a good thing: it’s as if a master builder had only one opportunity to create a building and tried to do a Bauhaus structure with Gothic gargoyles, rococo flying buttresses, and Frank Lloyd Wright glass.

Perhaps it’s not wise to gather up so many sages for one single tea. But it’s not cacophonous—-just a bit busy. I think that the citrus looms larger than the rest.

Or maybe a decent Earl Grey got loose in the kitchen one night and added all of the loose ingredients it could find to itself.

It has been a while since the Dammann Freres teas arrived and I’ve got so much tea to taste it’s taken me a while to get to writing about them, and partially because of that (or maybe because I didn’t realize it at the time I was picking things to sign up for before Doulton so graciously placed the order), I was not aware that three of the Dammann Freres teas I have include fig as an ingredient! This is, believe it or not, fig 3!

The leaves of this tea are so light in color and so green, I had to look it up to remind myself what kind of tea it was. I thought it might be a flavored green tea. But no, it’s a flavored black! It smells interesting, sort of like a perfume but not in a bad way. Citrus, flowers and — yeah, I can smell the fig! This time it is more of the pastry fig than the fresh, but still sweet and mouth watering.

The aroma has a fresh quality to it which is surprising when you consider the smell of the dry mixture. The tea is light bodied and fresh tasting, too. It has a quality in the taste that reminds me of the way Premier Figuier, the eau de toilette by L’Artisan, smells, with some citrus added in.

I need to try this again when I have a quiet moment. It’s a bit of a zoo here as it is almost bedtime for the younger set. But so far, I like.