Jardin Sauvage

This is one of the best rooibos teas I have ever drank. Got this with my happy bag purchase, ten teabags. I will buy this the next time I order from Lupicia in a couple of months. The taste of the mango is stronger than that of the citrus. The flavors in this tea just work right. It has just the right amount of savory and the right amount of sweet. It has a very mild rooibos flavor to it. You barely remember you are drinking a rooibos.

I brewed two teabags with approx 14 oz of boiling water for 5 min.

This sample came from greenteafairy. I was pretty excited to try it after loving Lupicia’s Golden Honeydew (also a fruit-flavored green rooibos). There are a couple of teensy pieces of candied fruit mixed in with the rooibos, I assume it’s mango. Dry scent is sweet yet tangy fruit.

Once it’s steeped, this tea smells very tangy and mango-ish. I can also smell citrus, which adds even more tang. Yummy, this one is actually sweeter than I thought it would be given the aroma – I’m not getting a whole lot of tang. It’s very sweet and fruity with lots of mango/peach flavor. The citrus is there a teensy bit, and it seems like lime to me? It’s a bit odd to taste lime with no tartness whatsoever, but I like the dimension it adds. Overall, yum!

Queued post, written May 25th 2014. This was supposed to have been posted yesterday but I kept getting the kettle page when trying to pull up the tea. Seems like I’ve chosen a good time to take a little step back from Steepster, kettle pages having been rampant lately. Reading Steepster is something I would like to do regularly, but started to feel rather like a chore that I must do combined with a general feeling of detachment. So I’ve stopped. I’m still posting and still writing and still drinking. I’m just not going to be reading much for a while.

Another one from the EU TTB 2. The problem with these French names is I have to look them up to see what they are. To a French speaking person it may be blindingly obvious from the name, but not to me. Therefore I must have looked this up when I had the box and decided it was interesting. Afterwards, however, it often takes me a fairly long time to get around to them because by then I’ve forgotten what they are. (In general, I don’t actually much like those blend names where it doesn’t say anything about what’s in it regardless of language. I don’t even like it in Danish. I’m sure it’s all fanciful and poetic and what not, but I still don’t know what’s in it.)

Following the raspberry hibiscus mint fiasco, however, I figured any was as good as another, so I just pulled something out of the box. This is what I ‘won’.

Unlike the other, this smells lovely. It’s all sweet and caramel-y, perhaps even a bit nutty. After steeping it smells quite nutty and a bit honeyed as well. When I look at the blend, there’s something in it that looks like rooibos, only not red. People always say that green rooibos tastes vastly different, so that might be it.

I’m going to look up what this is.

It is indeed a green rooibos! With mango and citrus. …what? Knowing that it’s there, I can find both. A touch of lemon in the flavour and a smidge of mango in the aftertaste. But before I knew it I wasn’t even anywhere close to identifying either of those two things. It’s quite subtle to begin with. As the cup cools, though, both become more clear.

This is oodles better than the raspberry mint concoction.

Given that it is summer, I absolutely had to have this iced. Jardin Sauvage was a great tea. I enjoyed the mild rooibos flavor which sat delicately behind the bolder fruity flavors the tea had to offer. The flavor is tropical, with mangoes and various citrus notes. I would recommend drinking it iced and I hardly think it needs sweetener.

Got this as a sample somewhere along the way. I’m having it hot, un sweetened and steeped at 4 minutes at boiling. I’m finding I like green rooibos much more than red. I’m getting a cirtusy aftertaste. Tangerine? It smells a bit like those effervescent vitamin tabs. I’m really not getting any mango here tho. I might wait for this cup to cool and try it again later.

I’m pretty sure I haven’t written a note for this yet, because it’s so confusing. I tried it cold when I was in the US in the fall and it was so ragingly delicious I just had to get it. And then I tried it hot and it was just vile, which made me lose my momentum a little. I sent some samples out to ask tea frens how they felt about it and cteresa has written a couple of helpful reviews; here is one of them: http://steepster.com/cteresa/posts/233978

One of the main reasons I’ve postponed this review, is that it’s so hard for me to pinpoint the flavours. I definitely get a citrus, but sweet, like a really ripe orange. Then there’s an additional layer of sweetness – the supposed mango, I assume, but it’s not entirely mango-like for me. Then again, I’m at a loss figuring out what it really is, and I’m beginning to regret starting this tasting note.

Finally, there’s a beautiful aftertaste of really good ice tea, a very natural flavour that lets you taste both the tea (strangely, as this is a green rooibos and shouldn’t taste like that at all) and the added fruit. There’s even a hint of smooth vanilla that rounds the whole thing off ever so nicely.

To sum it up, I really, really love this iced, but it’s near undrinkable for me hot. I have no idea how to rate that – I mean, I will go through this tin like it’s nothing, but it’s against my principles to highly rate one-trick teas. Aaaah!

I will ponder. Consider this rating temporary.

[From my Lupicia spree at Westfield Valley Fair in Santa Clara, October 2013.]

TheTeaFairy sent this one my way and I’ve been saving it for a day when I crave a juice iced tea. Although it’s Rooibos, the tea gods gave us the green kind for those of us folks who don’t care for the red. This has tropical fruit and it’s good but I have to say I will not be rushing out to add this to my cupboard no matter how good. It’s not fruity enough for me. It seems from other tasting notes that cold steeped is better but I made the entire sample with boiling water and iced so there’s none left to try cold brewing. No matter. It’s good but not enough to go to all the trouble and jump through all the lupicia hoops to get it in my cupboard.

Thank you to TheTeaFairy for satisfying my Lupicia curiosity.

I tried this first in a sample and was pretty amazed by it. When I first tasted it, I was perplexed enough by the flavor to have to look it up on the site; it was so sweet and tangy. The citrus flavor is definitely the primary flavor to me, but what got me was that sneaky mango aroma with it. Quite different! I thought it was pretty good, but didn’t think much more of it at the time—until a week later, where I was coming home from a long night at work and suddenly craved it. Now I keep a bag around at all times—it’s very relaxing to drink before sleeping, and the sweet and tanginess of it can really curve the periodic sweet tooth. The flavor definitely may not be for everyone, because it is rather strong. But I’d highly suggest trying it at least once to anyone!

This is another sample that TheTeaFairy sent me. Thank you!!!
Once again she chose one that I didn’t even notice. This too is REALLY good. I like red rooibos, I don’t have any problem with it. This one is a fruity green rooibos. It tastes like a tisane to me, I didn’t really get any rooibos at all. It’s a beautiful orange color, mango, fruity, FANTASTIC.
I JUST placed another Lupicia order tonight. I see a 3rd one in my future…. this is insane, but their teas are really good.

This tea is terribly pretty, which is part of the catch for me, as I store them in glass-lidded, magnetic tins stuck to my fridge door. I’m not sure what the striking little blue petals are, there are yellow petals and little chunks of mango amongst the green roobois. I haven’t had green roobois before . I had a temporary flirtation with red roobois in high school. That was a while ago. A very good while ago.

This tea also smells amazing dry, another draw card. There is mellow citrus but more of something else, like a heady cross between jubes and a dark liquor like brandy.

I brewed it with the kettle slightly off the boil, for the time it took to run some snoseal around the toes of my boots. This is an official measure of tea steeping time. The result was subtle. Too subtle? I popped the infuser back in and left it there while I lured little cups in sequence. Eventually the main thing to come out was orange citrus, it never got woody or bitter. Couldn’t really find the mango at all!