The most precious. A peak of refinement. A tea fit for an Emperor. An extraordinary mystique surrounds China�??s Silver Needle. That it is rare, there is no doubt. Only the silvery buds of selected tea bushes are picked for it, and only during a few days in early spring. But I learned long ago that rare doesn�??t necessarily mean good. Exclusive and expensive are words that appeal to fashion-conscious people who often lack the tools to make up their mind by themselves. Now, I have many shortcomings, but the desperate need to belong to any jet set doesn�??t number among them. Which is probably why I had never had the urge to try it until the tour started and I felt I could hardly skip the cream of China�??s crop.

Still, Silver Needle is universally celebrated as the world�??s best white tea and it is with respectful curiosity that I approached it today. I got a small sample from Special Teas and brewed it by steeping two soup spoons in 6oz steaming water for two minutes. It yielded a pale golden cup with a lovely scent of herbs and sweet flowers. It was sweet in the mouth too, but with some herby and nutty notes at the end. All very delicate, though, very mild. Hints, suggestions, impressions, rather than flavors. Which immediately brought to mind Berthe Morisot in her more intimate paintings.

The second steep had a slightly stronger herby accent but was still very elegant and restrained, confirming the first impression. This is a brew for a quiet meditation on an early spring afternoon, when the sun is still cool.

A good tea? Yes. The best in the world? Not by a long shot.

Nobody wanted the whites. They languished on the very top shelf of the China cabinet like a jewel that is too precious for people to afford. Oh, people smelled them. They would make uhh and ahh noises. But they would never buy. I don�??t think it was because the whites were expensive, although the Silver Needles did raise a couple of eyebrows. Many of these people didn�??t blink at blowing phenomenal sums on silver trays. But there was something about their downy leaves, fuzzy like newborn poultry, that puzzled people. Or maybe it was the intense herby scent that jumped out when the canisters were finally released from their exile.

But you could read their thoughts in their eyes. This is no proper tea. Where is the lucid blackness of the leaf, the pugnacious scent. It was all too ephemeral, too evanescent to spend good money on.
These teas fit for an Emperor, which were only gathered a few days a year, intrigued me. But I couldn�??t afford them then and they somehow fell out of my radar until years later, when white tea had firmly come into fashion and I saw a caddy in a shop. On impulse, I bought it.

It was my first Pai Mu Tan. It was different from my beloved black, just like my reluctant customers of yore had feared, and it took me a while to get adjusted to it. But when I accepted that there was another way of drinking�??quiet and serene where my blacks were sturm und drang�??it flung open new horizons. So it was with some nostalgia for younger days that I approached another Pai Mu Tan caddy today.

It was from an Italian shop I hadn�??t tried before, L�??Arte del Ricevere. The shop�??s insistence on �??the latest trends from Paris�?� somewhat put me off, but I must say the tea came nicely packaged with detailed instructions for a European-style infusion in a teapot and an Oriental-style infusion in a gaiwan. I tried them both. The European one called for 2g leaves per 5oz water and seven to ten minutes�?? steeping time. The Oriental style used 4g leaves per gaiwan with a steeping time of four minutes.

Both cups were a pale golden color, slightly deeper for the Oriental one. The scent was like a sunbaked meadow. I kept finding hay and straw in it too. In the mouth, though, they came across rather differently. The Oriental infusion was sweet at first impact with a long herbaceously nutty note in the finish.The European infusion was like a pale photocopy where the machine has run out of ink. Much blander. Like Aelbert Cuyp and Abraham Calraet. Had I tried it on its own, maybe, I would have enjoyed its delicate quality. But tasted side by side with the other one, it was as easily (and perhaps unjustly) forgotten as my lovely whites were on yonder days of black dominance.