Fine teas come from handpicked tea leaves that include only the newest growth: two leaves and a bud. This makes drinking a cup of fine tea an extraordinary experience. Those tea leaves lived a short but vibrant life, only ten days at the most. As we drink the tea from our cup, we are savoring the essence of ten days spent absorbing nature. We are tasting the rise and fall of the temperature as days rolled into nights rolled into days, the finite amount of sunshine and moonshine that showered the leaves, and maybe even some moisture from misty mornings. And we taste the wind. Tea growers say that the amount and type of wind in those ten days have a great deal of influence on the taste of the tea in our cups. The ephemeral essence of nature leaves some record of itself in the tea leaf and offers us a taste of the natural world. With the flavor of rain and wind and sunshine already on our tongues, we can easily begin to smell and see and feel the impressions around us.