Thés primeurs 2025: springtime flavours in your teapot

Our long-awaited 2025 teas have arrived! This is a unique opportunity to taste fresh, delicate teas bursting with springtime flavours.

India First Flush Teas: enjoy black teas with incomparable fruity and floral notes

Every year, between March and May, the young shoots of the tea bushes light up the many gardens that dot the region with their tender green color. Filled with their rich aromatic substances, slowly accumulated over the winter, they are used to make the first teas of the year, distinguished by their freshness and lively attack with delicious fruity and floral accents. These delicate, airy flavours stand out from the rounder, more mature notes of the year's other harvests, making these spring black teas an enchantment for the palate.

This 2025 vintage has once again provided us with some wonderful surprises, highlighting the specific characteristics of each tea garden and the expertise of our Indian partners.

A late but highly aromatic 2025 harvest

This year's harvest was exceptionally late, due to severe drought in winter and early spring. The rains came very late, as they did last year. Climate change is becoming an increasingly perceptible reality every year, and one to which our partner growers are facing up and having to adapt.

The first rains in spring, when the first harvests can begin, are eagerly awaited. They have a direct impact on the quality of the harvest.

Quantities harvested were low due to these climatic conditions, but also to the choice of a demanding selection of buds to prioritize quality. As the tea bushes have grown more slowly, the teas from the 2025 vintage are particularly concentrated in aroma, and this can be felt on tasting.

The characteristics of each terroir are particularly well highlighted, and lovers of our primeurs will find the "signature" of each garden.

Our favorites among the 2025 Indian teas:

• TN215 Himayan Secret SFTGFOP1 FF (Seeyok garden)
• TN207 Potong FTGFOP1 FF (Potong cooperative)
• TB374 Putharjhora Silver Drops (Putharjhora garden)
• TB371 Snowview Griffes (Snowview garden)

2025 China Mingqian: invite the cream of Chinese green teas into your cup

Rare primers reserved almost exclusively for the Chinese market, Mingqian (明前) represent the quintessence of green teas. Made exclusively from small buds, they are harvested in the spring from late March to early April before the Qingming Festival (April 4, 2025). The daily quantity harvested entirely by hand is minimal, and it takes 4 kg of fresh leaves to obtain one kilo of finished tea!

It's with great pleasure that we offer you these great vintages from these intimate harvests. Their softness and particularly sweet, fruity aromas make them very gourmet teas. With their rich aromas, they symbolize the awakening of spring after a long period of dormancy.

Spring grand crus rich in aromas and flavours, for a special tasting experience

This year, very low temperatures marked the beginning of spring and delayed the harvest in the various tea-growing provinces with which we work. The tea bushes, like last year, grew more slowly than usual and the young spring shoots were fewer in number, but they were able to develop complex flavours over a longer period of time.

Their sap, loaded with many nutrients drawn from the soil after the winter rest period, is therefore more concentrated in aromatic principles. With its rich, particularly sweet and fruity flavours, this 2025 vintage embodies the quintessence of Chinese spring teas.

Our favorites among China 2025 teas:

• TV105 Spring Sprout
• TV112 Lü Zhen Green Needle Special - 绿针

Fuding silver needles: the irresistible freshness of a prestigious white tea..

As soon as the thermometer starts to climb, the freshness of a white tea becomes irresistible! And when it's a "mingqian" from the prestigious local Da Bai and Da Hao cultivars, as is the case with our Fuding Silver Needles, you can expect a real feast for the palate!

Hand-picked in the tea gardens of Fuding in Fujian province, this grand cru is made exclusively from tender, plump buds with naturally silky, silvery down.

Unlike green tea, this white tea has not been fired or rolled. The buds have simply been picked very selectively, withered in the open air to release their water, and sun-dried before being sorted and packed, giving these "silver needles" a very fresh, natural feel.

Having been processed very little, however, they require hotter water and a longer infusion time than green teas. The result is a pretty liqueur with orange hues, distilling succulent flavours of marzipan and hints of licorice wood that linger on the palate.

Shincha of Japan 2025: enjoy the freshness of Japanese green teas

Produced between sea and mountains, Japanese teas are increasingly attracting green tea lovers, seduced by the freshness, bright color and fruity, vegetal flavours of these fine needles. Our shincha 2025 vintage comes from Uji (the historic cradle of green tea), Shizuoka (renowned for its mountain teas) and Kagoshima (renowned for its mild climate and volcanic soils).

Like last year, we're lucky enough to be offered a superb Kama-Iri cha. This green tea, much sought-after by Japanese green tea lovers, is a true rarity. Unlike other steamed Japanese green teas, this tea comes from an ancient traditional hot-plate cooking method (hon gama) close to the Chinese method. The fruity, gourmet flavours of this tea are pleasantly underscored by light roasted notes.

An excellent vintage 2025 thanks to ideal climatic conditions

Like last year, 2025 proved to be a very good vintage for Japanese spring green teas. The weather was very cold before the harvest, making for a very special start to the season for our partner producers. Thanks to the very slow growth of the tea leaves due to the cold, they accumulated an exceptional wealth of aromatic principles.

However, this slow growth resulted in lower-than-usual yields for many first-harvest teas. The early varieties in particular seem to have been affected, but the result is some magnificent aromatic profiles. We're delighted to be able to offer you these terroir shinchas, characterized by dense, aromatic and, above all, gourmet liqueurs!

Our shincha from the Morimoto family in Miyazaki (Kyushu) is our favorite

Shigeru Morimoto and his wife Haruyo have been growing organic tea for decades in Kawaminami, a village in Miyazaki prefecture on Kyushu island, the southernmost of the Japanese archipelago.

The garden's history began in 1935, when Shigeru's grandfather and father planted the first tea bush seeds in Miyazaki and founded the Morimoto Tea Garden. The garden is divided into a dozen small plots with 9 different cultivars used to make only green tea: Yukata Midori, Saki Midori, Yabukita, Minami Syoka, Oku Midori, Oku Yutaka, Kanaya Midori, Benifuuki and Sunrouge.

This diversity of cultivars not only provides greater protection against the vagaries of climate and insect attack, but also opens up numerous possibilities for pairing and balancing flavours. One example is this Morimoto shincha we started selling last year, made up of 2/3 Yukata Midori ombré and 1/3 Saki Midori. These two early cultivars, hence the name midori (soft spring green), complement each other perfectly. Yukata Midori has the particularity of withstanding heat well, and is therefore naturally widespread on the island of Kyushu, where it was developed. It adds structure to this shincha with its natural astringency and vegetal character, softened by a short period of shade. Saki midori brings its natural sweetness and fruitiness to the whole.

Our favorite teas from Japan 2025:

• TJ082 Shincha Uji
• TJ088 Shincha Miyazaki