real tea flavor

I did not buy the emporer's tea. I am in Hangzhou, by all accounts the epicenter of the the production of the ultimate tea, in the one country more associated with the drink than any other. In the hilly lands outside of this former imperial city, well off tea farmers build their sturdy multi-story houses on the steep, winding streets that abut their terraced fields of tea, with the odd peaked-straw-hatted worker bending over the crops. Everywhere in the area you come across shops that sell the local dragonwell green tea, with workers drying the green leaves by rubbing them by hand in lightly oiled woks. But today we were at a plantation that purports to make the real thing in a land where every other product is a knockoff, a "jiade", or a "genuine fake" as our guide likes to call it. (Next to a bottle of Johnny Walker Black in a store last night I saw a nearly identical bottle of "Master Walker Red." Coffee shops like "Moca" shameslessly copy Starbucks' look and logo.) In fact, they have a statue of the Buddhist monk who supposedly discovered that tea helped him concentrate when he was meditating without eating food. Sometime later the Emporer tasted tea and proclaimed that he couldn't go a day without a cup.
But when Grace, our guide to the world of green tea, sat us down in a house on the tea plantation and poured hot water over our green leaves, the flavor was very much unlike the rich flavor of the fermented dark teas I've had in the past. It was a light taste (what she called "fresh" but others might call "grassy"). I know I've tasted tea like this before but never really returned for a second cup. But Grace took us through the various pickings of the tea, starting with the dark summer tea, going earlier in the spring to the grade A tea, and finally ending with the Emporer's tea, picked in mid-March. And after subsequent tastings; some atmospheric instruction in how one drinks such tea; the repetition of claims about the health benefits of green tea for those with a tendency to high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and diabetes; the parading and viewing and sniffing of successively lighter (and earlier picked) samples of tea spread on flat bamboo baskets; after all of this, many of the 20 of us around the table were awed when Grace's assistant brought out the kilo package of the Emporer's tea, beautifully wrapped in shiny red paper and ribbon, and then spread it out onto the flat woven bamboo basket for us to view and smell. We noticed the rich, full aroma of the Emporer's tea. We saw how much finer and lighter it was than the large, coarse leaves of summer tea. We crunched a few of the fine leaves between our teeth and noted that the taste was not bitter, just as Grace had promised.
So when it was time to get on the bus, one after another of my group -- even our tour leaders -- raised their hands and asked for the Emporer's tea, which Grace expertly packed by hand into bright red metal tins, despite its imperial price of 300 yuan per box (about $40). Some looked across the table searching for partners to "go in" with them for a "family" of three tins to save a few yuan.
I, however, coldbloodedly ignored the imploring eyes of my tourmates and settled for a box of the Grade A tea, for only 200 yuan, or about $26. I do have a cholesterol problem, after all.