Zui Tao Xi (The Drunkest Peach)
Black Tea 2025
We present to you the headiest of black teas, the peachiest of Drunken Peaches. This stand-out batch offers the white peach aromas of Zui Qun Fang (Drunken Peach) but with heightened sharpness, intensity, and persistence.
Original price was: $26.75.$21.40Current price is: $21.40.
- 2024 $14.20
- Tea Origin
- Lingtou Mountain Farm, Tongmu Village, Wuyishan City, Fujian Province, China
- Tea Bush
- Tongmu Cao Mukui Qizhong (Tongmu Heirloom Tea Bush)
- Tea Maker
- Wu Jianming
- Harvest Time
- Late April
- Plucking Standard
- One bud, three leaves
Zui Tao Xi (The Drunkest Peach) is a single batch of leaves from the spring 2025 harvest of a specific patch, in a specific tea garden, on Tongmu’s Lingtou mountain. By the serendipity of nature and Mr. Wu’s own careful technique (with special importance placed on the rolling), those leaves yielded the most pure and high peach aromas of all the lots this year.
And since this batch was so distinct, Mr. Wu had put these leaves aside as a sort of secret ingredient, judiciously adding portions of this batch into his other more classical black tea blends to add a natural charge of creamy and sweet complexity where needed. It’s not something he’d imagined selling on its own, but as a special favor, Mr. Wu portioned out a small quantity of this unblended lot for us.
Enjoyers of mellow-bodied and highly-aromatic black teas, like Anji Hong, Laoshu Dianhong (Old Tree Yunnan), and of course, Mr. Wu’s classic Zui Qun Fang (Drunken Peach), will find some fun tea sessions in this one, as will those who appreciate the tangy-sweet stone fruit associations in Wuyi and Dan Cong wulongs.
New inventions rooted in old Wuyi tea traditions
Seven Cups has always supported both traditional tea craftsmanship as well as skilled innovation that results in quality tea and sustainable agriculture. Mr. Wu combines the best of both in Drunken Peach. With his cross-disciplinary expertise in Wuyishan’s traditions of making both black and wulong teas, he has developed new techniques to produce a stunning high end black tea that is naturally fruity, sweet, and complex. The signature longan-fruit flavor of Tongmu’s quntizhong heirloom tea bushes transforms into an enduring ripe peach character.
For a long span of history, Chinese black tea was made as a low-grade export product, but recent years have seen the rise of new high-end black teas like Drunken Peach. You can learn more about recent shifts in black tea production in our blog posts How Chinese Tea Conquered the World (and then China) and The East is Red: China’s Red (Black) Tea Renaissance.
The birthplace of black tea in Tongmu
Smoked Tongmu Lapsang Souchong was the world’s first black tea, created out of necessity by the innovative tea farmers in the small Tongmu Village in Fujian Province of southeastern China. Tongmu Village was founded between 1607 to 1644. The terrain in this small village was difficult to farm on so the villagers were only able to successfully grow tea and bamboo. Since they were not able to grow enough food to last them through the harsh mountain winters they relied heavily on selling their exceptionally sweet tea, rich in amino acids due to the high altitude it was grown at. At this time, green tea was the only tea that had been invented yet, so the tea was made by pan frying and shaping to then be roasted over a bamboo roaster fueled by odorless bamboo charcoal.
The return of modern Tongmu black tea
Tongmu Village is again at the forefront of black tea innovation today. Jin Jun Mei, a popular new single-bud black tea, was invented by Tongmu tea maker Liang Junde in 2005 and inspired a wave of renewed interest in China’s high-end black teas. Wu Jianming is a Tongmu native who learned tea making from both Mr. Liang and noted Wuyishan rock wulong tea maker Liu Guoying. Mr. Wu’s exceptional teas, like Zui Qun Fang, are the fruit of his dedication to the craft and the signature quality of Tongmu-grown tea.
No chemical fertilizer, pesticide, or herbicide was used in the production of this tea. Click here to read more about our promise to fair trade and the environment.
