This was my first Darjeeling white tea, and it's about as impressive as sitting through an hour-long staff meeting with a well-advertised, nicely dressed, but ultimately monotonic guest speaker droning on about an uninteresting subject.

At first, I was intrigued. The best part of the experience was the dry-bag aroma, which reminded me distinctly of a combination of tea, chocolate and faint licorice. That was an unfair tease! Seldom has a tea I've tried so clearly devolved from highly promising to disappointingly bland, from nose to mouth. The taste isn't that unpleasant, just very mild, hardly there. If sweetened, I taste the sweetener far more than the tea, and the unsweetened tea (which I rarely drink, but tried this time) tastes mostly like hot water with a faint hint of tea, and disproportionate yet still-faint bitterness. The description of this tea, found on the outside of the gift box in which it was packaged, says, "unfermented and lightly rolled, with a smooth and delicate flavor." The taste indeed is so delicate as to be essentially absent.

What little aroma exists in-cup and in the wet bag is rather flat and somewhat musty. When the wet bag is fluffed up (and it swells up nicely...no skimping on quantity here!) the coarse chopping of the leaves becomes apparent; this almost is a loose-leaf tea in a tea bag. However, I'm not convinced the *quality* of leaves chosen is the best, given the lack of greater aroma and flavor. I hope this isn't representative of Darjeeling white teas in general; so far, I much prefer the black and green teas from that area, and the Chinese white teas.

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