Tea Culture and Wine Culture in China

You know, I came to China so I could research and understand more about China's tea culture. But actually, what I ended up doing is learning a lot about China's modern wine culture.

But why? I'll tell you why, I was kind of forced into it. Everytime you eat dinner with friends, or go out with friends (usually guys) - they always order beer or wine. Then, they make all kinds of rounds of toasts - because drinking alcohol is a social thing. You don't drink alone. You must toast a person, and drink together - and it's always bottoms up. No little sips or anything like that.

Then, comes bottle after bottle after bottle. After everyone is full from dinner, they will start playing drinking games. Yes, they have games here to making drinking a more fun pastime. Not like tea - not really any games to play - except maybe: "guess how much I paid for this tea?"

Like I said before, they have different drinking games here - like: rock, paper, scissors; guessing fingers. And another one is a dice guessing game. And there are many other of these drinking games. But the end result is the same - if you suck at playing these games, you will get drunk very quickly - it's almost impossible to not get drunk once these people start drinking.

So basically, even if you're a tealover, it's almost unadvoidable to not get drunk, or to not drink in China. At some point you have to do it - because that's the social thing to do. Even girls get really smasing drunk too - but they always try to avoid drinking, and try their best to only drink just a little bit. Except the men always force them to drink up, saying it's not fair. Hahahaha. But I'm not that mean though. I just let them get away with it.

But you know, when someone toasts you, you can't refuse, because it's like an insult. You don't give the other person face. So that's why it's inevitable and unavoidable to drink here. Plus it's a big social thing.

Then, the second day, after recovering from a heavy night of drinking - you can always turn to tea to partly restore you back to health - there's that and rice porridge.

Yes, I know it's better to stick to tea culture, but wine culture is so in-your-face here too, so it's unavoidable.

I'm Back and Thoughts on Rinsing Tea Leaves

Well, I'm still in China, but now I can finally post some new material on here. It's been awhile. Things have been busy here in Fujian. We didn't have rain for like over 2 months during September and October and a part of November. There was just thick dust on all the tree leaves. It gets like that here - lots of dust in the homes, on buildings, and on trees. You can literally see the dust caked on the leaves.

And, if you see dust on the leaves, then, if it rains you should avoid walking under the leaves - otherwise you'll end up with a dirty mess on your clothes.

Since there's so much dust, it seems to me that the leaves on the tea trees would be covered in dust if there's no rain too. But they would wash that off before processing anyway.

But, still, just gives another reason why you should rinse your leaves when you brew tea. They might have all kinds of accumulated dust on them - at some point.

I'm living in Southern Fujian, and Anxi is not very far from here - where Tieguanyin comes from - and other kinds of teas - like Benshan, Maoxie, and Huangjingui.

Everyone here drinks Tieguanyin, it's like the king of wulong teas, especially when talking about southern Fujian teas.

Yes, Tieguanyin is king, and everyone drinks it exclusively. They don't even look at other kinds of teas. That's how so highly regarded it is. I drank some of the autumn pick, and it was pretty good. But, not having rain for 2 months means the crop is not as perfect as it could have been - when compared to prior years. But it's still very good though.