caveat emptore Dragon Well

Be warned to choose your vendor carefully and to know your teas intimately:

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Nigel at Teacraft

Reply to
Nigel at Teacraft
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Nigel at snipped-for-privacy@posting.google.com4/9/04

05: snipped-for-privacy@teacraft.com

Good word, "intimately". Scary point well taken. Generally I try to choose vendors who at least travel to Asia often and have some relationship with the farmers. I try to stay away from those vendors who work only through "agents". Further, I choose vendors who are willing and eager to talk to me about the teas, who answer my questions and are engaged. I avoid those who don't know and won't find out. I shun those who don't answer e-mails or phone calls. Beyond that, I'm pretty helpless. (I should add by way of shameful disclosure, that I have chosen a higher priced tea working under the assumption that it would be authentic while a cheaper version might not be.)

Apropos of your last post regarding CTC/dust/orthodox leaf, it seems to me that ultimately it's little more than style and taste. Just as people read books differently -- at different speeds, levels of depth, for different reasons, from different vantage points -- so with tea: People drink it from any number of perspectives, no one of which is more valid than another. Since I feel best when my visual sense is involved, I go for full leaf. I suspect too that more complexity is possible with full leaf since the leaf doesn't give up all its gifts at once while the little tiny pieces probably do. Again, styles and tastes reign.

On a third note -- I know I asked before, but I forgot -- a friend of mine, while living in Cuba, regularly drank a Georgia tea. She'd like to have a Georgia tea again to bring back those fond memories of Cuba and her life there. It's not a "high" quality leaf she's looking for. Probably a CTC. Where do I get this for her?

Best, Michael

Reply to
Michael Plant

I wonder how TenRen is going to respond to having a picture of their product posted with the article?

Cameron

Reply to
Cameron Lewis

Cameron snipped-for-privacy@posting.google.com4/9/04

11: snipped-for-privacy@mailandnews.com

Cameron, perhaps you are referring to a mysterious picture on the page with the article that will not load here on my computer.

Michael

Reply to
Michael Plant

Funny that the allegation is made without any citations of examples. I don't doubt that fraud is going on, though, given that Dragon Well is synonymous among the general public with quality. Does the author avoid naming names for fear of legal action?

Maybe end-user experienced tasters have tried samples from various vendors and can tell "this isn't the real thing," yet it's still hard to prove.

The article obscures the fact that there are several grades of authentic DW.

Anyway, the precautions Michael mentioned earlier sound quite prudent.

Joe

Reply to
Joseph Kubera

Okay, thanks. Maybe it was wishful thinking. :-)

Ian

Reply to
Ian Rastall

Browsing with Opera 7 shows a picture of a box of TenRen Dragonwell teabags on the upper right hand side of the article.

Cheers

Reply to
Cameron Lewis

snipped-for-privacy@mailandnews.com (Cameron Lewis) wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@posting.google.com:

I see it too, in both Opera and IE 5.5.

Reply to
fLameDogg

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