Yoin, the Gyokuro aftertaste and our pursuit of the long finish

Contrary to common practice, we treat summer as our new year at Circadian. It gives us time to catch up with peers, revisit old conversations, take stock of what the previous season taught us, and decide what deserves more attention in the next.

One conversation stayed with me this summer.

A friend compared what Ocean Umami left with her to Proust’s madeleine. The comparison was not exact. She had no earlier memory of Gyokuro waiting to be recovered. What stayed with her was the duration of the experience itself. The drink had ended, yet something remained open.

Similar to the French author, Orhan Pamuk once described finding an old cinema ticket in a forgotten coat and recovering the smell of the cinema, the atmosphere of the evening and the feeling of that night. In both cases, a small sensory trace carries something far larger than itself.

Gyokuro can work in another direction. Rather than returning us to one fixed memory, its long finish can suspend the moment for a little longer. Together with umami, it creates a kind of liminal space. The palate remains occupied while the mind is free to wander through its own associations.

After a long hiatus from writing here, that conversation returned me to a quality I have cared about for years.

Before starting Circadian, I maintained a private database of dozens of Gyokuro farmers and many more cultivars, gardens and growing conditions. I recorded region, shading, harvest, cultivar and processing. Beside these sat a column more often encountered on tea trading floors and competition tables than in everyday language.

Length

I already knew the idea from other practices. Chinese tea uses terms such as yan yun 岩韻 to describe a quality that exceeds any single flavour note. It points towards character, resonance and the impression that remains. In wine, longueur en bouche describes the length that remains after swallowing. 

Japanese tea has a different term; yoin 余韻. It describes the resonance left after an experience has passed. And the word belongs as naturally to music as it does to taste. The parallel with piano sustain became hard to ignore.

Strike a piano key and the note begins with an attack. Press the sustain pedal and something else happens. The sound continues after the hand leaves the key. Harmonics open, overlap and decay. The first impact may catch the ear, but the life of the note reveals itself afterwards.

Gyokuro can do the same. Intensity tells us how something begins and length tells us what survives.

A Gyokuro can arrive with enormous umami and end abruptly. Another can enter with less force and continue to change. Green notes become floral. Texture stays on the tongue while aroma returns through the nose. The liquid has gone, but the experience continues.

Expressing length

Length begins in the raw material, whether leaf or stem. Cultivation, cultivar, harvest and processing establish its potential. Cold-extraction ideology elongates that potential further.

This is one reason we select for Yoin. We want an expression to do more than taste exceptional while it is being drunk. We want it to hold the moment open for a little longer.

Sometimes that lingering sensation will call back a meal, a room or a person. Sometimes it does something less specific and perhaps more interesting. It creates space for memory without determining which memory should enter. The glass is still standing but the mind has wandered.  

Thank you, dear reader, for sticking till the end of the article. And thank you, Frances, for making the invisible visible.

Mahmoud