Climate affects tea quality in many ways depending on the tea being made. Some teas are manufactured indoors, so weather doesn't affect them. The first pickings of each year are dependent on the winter and spring before and after a tea is picked. At best, the first buds of spring tea are the most flavorful, catching the sap as it surges out of the roots with the nutrients that have accumulated over the winter. The quality of the first spring buds do not necessarily decide the quality of later summer pickings; they do decide if a year will be remembered as great, however because more often than not for Yunnan dark teas. Paradoxically, if there is dry and cold weather there are fewer tea buds of lesser quality. These will cost more. A perfect year, on the other hand, will be cheaper due to more tea leaves hitting the market! If green teas are not so much affected, a good question to ask is what is a Yunnan dark tea?
The last few years have not been thought to be great tea years for Yunnan's famous dark teas. This is not the case in other areas. For example, 2008 and 2009's first green tea was bitter. However the 2008 and 2009 white tea in Fujian could be shade dried nearly to perfection. In 2010 the first green tea was fixed full of flavor even though the rains came early, but these rains made traditional white tea unavailable. In 2010 the first buds of white tea had to be dried electrically because the weather was too damp, making it oxidize into what the Fujanese farmers call Hong (red) Hao Yin Zhen and not Bai (white) Hao Yin Zhen. 2010 white tea is more expensive than it was in 2009! But for Yunnan dark tea there is a different story.
In Yunnan Puer tea comes from a wider swath of geologically diverse areas so the spring weather varies and it is not easy to make simple generalizations, however many tea traders do hold forth that 2008 was not a good year because there was a 2008 drought. In 2009 Lancang Wild Puer was much brighter in taste than 2010 because of the sparse rainfall again in Southern Yunnan. This year tea traders in Kunming are also saying 2011 has been too dry; the tea will be duller, leading even to wild-fires in the west. Some blame North China's seeding of rain clouds for this disturbance which has successfully created more rain in the north of China since 2008 (Yunnan is in the south of China). We are looking to sample the first spring leaves at Puer, Nannuo, and Menghai.
