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  • A bottle of Saicho Jasmine Sparkling Tea, featuring a pale yellow liquid inside a clear glass bottle with a blue label and a decorative cranes pattern on the neck seal, set against a solid off-white background.
  • Saicho Jasmine
  • Saicho Jasmine Sparkling Tea served in a wine glass
Saicho

Saicho Jasmine

$20
$20
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Size: 200 mL

Fujian, in spring.

Saicho holds tea to the standard of wine. Founded by Natalie Chiu and Charlie Winkworth-Smith — food scientists, husband and wife — and named for the monk who first carried tea from China to Japan, it exists to give tea its rightful place at the table: the same glass, the same considered hand. That conviction is why they entered the house.

Jasmine is the florals of the wall. Fuding Big White Leaf from the tea fields of Fujian, hand-picked in spring when the new buds carry their most delicate flavour, then layered with fresh jasmine blossoms over several nights — the leaf absorbing the perfume slowly, naturally, until neither overwhelms the other. Cold-brewed a full day in English spring water and finished with a fine carbonation. Bright jasmine, soft honey, lychee and fresh pear beneath — a clean green undertone keeping the floral from ever turning sweet.

Jasmine is the tea most people think they know — the oversweetened bottles shaped the expectation. This one resets it.

We do not score. We read. Each tea carries its own Reading — four axes, written on the four petals of the mark.

The Reading™

NOSE    floral

ARC    soft

WEIGHT    delicate

STAY    softest tannin

One to four petals, quiet to pronounced. A Reading is a location, not a grade.

Read in — the handblown Stem Zero Masterglass. The bowl gathers the aroma and lifts it to the nose before the first sip.

Serve — well chilled. 

Nose — Floral. Jasmine rises first, bright and unmistakable — soft honey behind it, a clean green thread underneath.

Arc — Soft. It opens rather than travels — the perfume settling gently across the palate, never pressing.

Weight — Delicate. The lightest touch of the four — lychee and fresh pear over a fine, quiet bead.

Stay — Softest tannin. The gentlest dry close on the wall — enough grip to end clean, never enough to interrupt.

The Table — Raw bar. Dim sum. Steamed fish and soft greens — anything that asks for perfume rather than weight. Or alone, in the late afternoon.
A bottle of Saicho Jasmine Sparkling Tea, featuring a pale yellow liquid inside a clear glass bottle with a blue label and a decorative cranes pattern on the neck seal, set against a solid off-white background.
Saicho Jasmine
$20
$20