Ali's Shan

Have not really been a huge fan of Alishan tea. Call me stubborn, but one look at the hazy smog and hundreds of tour buses that visit this area, as well as the loud speakers booming about how great the teas are, made me abit queasy. I might favour Taiwan oolongs in general, but never, ever, have I considered Alishan teas.
This year, I decided to re-visit it. To confess, Alishan has these great ume pickled plums that I love, and so, looking for some better Alishan oolongs was the excuse, but getting the plums was the plan. As luck would have it, without an agenda nor route plan ( I actually subconsciously wanted to just fail in my mission to prove my point), we got lost, and ended up turning into a hidden area of the mountain. Far tucked away amidst the 'Immortal Trees' and bamboo groves, as it turned out, was a smallish farm run by a woman tea master. She moonlights as a hoteler/vacation hostel hostess, so a nice house of sorts sits amidst her tea fields. Hers are the original Alishan teas, she explained. Highly skeptical, I sat down to taste the tea. She was quite assertive in denouncing the Taiwan tea scandal, where cheap Vietnamese and Thai made 'Taiwan High Mountain' teas were re-imported into Taiwan and mixed with teas such as hers and sold as local teas. The result are teas that lose aroma after the first, and lose taste after the second, steeping. Alishan teas, she says, came from original Taiwan Varietal number 12, and not the Jin Shuan or any of the later species. Most definitely, you can taste the difference! She challenged me to taste, smell, and also, break apart the steeped leaves to see how tough they were, as one of the distinguishing criteria.
Her tea had the distinctive Taiwan flavor alright, with a deep golden color, intense fragrance, and very little astringency. This Alishan oolong is definitely miles better than the kinds I have tasted, and I suspect that she might be right. Alishan mountain is famous in Taiwan for being a beautiful tourist area, and tourists from the world over know only Alishan tea. There was simply too much demand and tourists wouldn't know the difference anyway! With such unscrupulous and short sighted arrangement of increasing availability, Alishan has made its name questionable for tea fanatics like myself.
In any case, most of the area is still extremely polluted, full of tour buses spewing black smoke into the tea bushes planted just slightly above the roads. I brought some of the hidden mountain Alishan tea from the woman tea master, and folks, it would be good to taste it if only for experience. Her tea is good, but well, again, it's an embarrassment of riches! We simply have much better, and we are all awefully spoiled.
Got the plums, mission accomplished! Serve at Harvest Party III perhaps.

Taken from http://teapersonality.blogspot.com/