Tea Tasting vs Sake Tasting

A friend and I went tea tasting at Numi Tea Garden in Oakland. Numi has a wonderful circular entranceway leading into the main room. They also have a huge wooden tea storage chest with over 50 drawers of tea for sale. For the tea tasting there were 18 different variations of Pu Erh tea that were blended by Numi for a future selection. For those who aren't familiar with puehr tea, "this is China's mystery tea - the process to create puerh is still a secret. The tea is aged, fermented. Like wine, the longer the aging, the better the tea. Its marvelously rich body, slightly earthy and mellow character is very popular for its health properties - namely known to eliminate cholesterol and drunk with or after meals as a digestif". It's amazing how differently people's taste buds determine which flavors they prefer. While my friend and I preferred the lighter, mellower blends, others liked the stronger, bold and bitter blends. I had never gone tea tasting before so I didn't know what to expect. I thought to myself is this going to be like wine tasting and we'd have to swish the tea around in our pallet and then spit it out? Luckily that was not the case! The only similarity between tea and wine tasting I noticed was that we started with the lighter blends and moved to the darker blends. By the time we finished with the 18th blend I had had my fill of tea and couldn't taste one more cup of tea. My friend made a comment and said, it's funny how now a days we go tea tasting instead of sake tasting. I guess we're getting up there in age!