Turn Valentine’s Day Into a Weekend of Intimacy
One of the many things we love about Valentine’s Day is how it nurtures something that too often leaks away from our busy days and lives: intimacy.
Conversations with our partners revolve around things like who’s picking up the kids, or dishwashing duties. Errands end up dominating weekends. We talk endlessly about home repairs, budgets and work gossip.
And then there’s losing ourselves to our screens: television, doom scrolling on our phones, playing video games and the rest of it.
But for Valentine’s Day, none of these things align with the holiday’s warm embrace. Love’s only holiday compels us to savor time with our romantic partners, if we are lucky to have them. To whisper to each other about love. To shed the world’s distractions, if only for a day, and dwell in intimacy.
The whole vibe can happily incorporate a range of things: dinner over candlelight, a hand-in-hand stroll to dinner or in the mountains. For us, it also suggests tea. For many people, the brewing and sipping of tea stands as an act of intimacy. It’s not something we do on the go, or while pursuing with other activities, like house work.
Let tea nurture intimacy during love’s holiday
Instead, we carve out time, sit at a table, and talk while ambrosial steam rises from our cups. Tea is sensory. Engaging with it invites slowness, warmth and attention—if we let it.
This Valentine’s Day, let’s add at least a little tea ceremony to the experience. First, let’s shop carefully for special teas to share with a loved one. On love’s big day, let’s present the teas as thoughtful gifts. As Valentine’s Day falls on a Saturday this year, we can conjure intimacy all weekend through the magic of tea.
Brew them one at a time, sit together, talk, touch. Let tea help spark and stoke fresh heat—to ignite and bolster intimacy.
Happy Valentine’s Day!
Intimacy Teas: Da Hong Pao
Da Hong Pao stands as one of China’s premier, yet accessible, teas. People brew and pour it for Chinese New Year—which starts on Feb. 17!—to celebrate the year to come with special, and festoon it with good fortune. They also appreciate its name—Big Red Robe, in Chinese. The color dominates Chinese New Year, and adds to Da Hong Pao’s popularity during the holiday.
We think it serves similar purposes for Valentine’s Day. Precious tea to mark an important holiday? Yes. Color-aligned with love’s only holiday? Red—of course! And the color, too, most closely associated with intimacy.
The tea, a prized rock oolong from China’s Wu Yi Mountains in Fujian Province, has been championed by tea lovers since the early 18th century. It is well-known for its strong fragrance; rich, roasted taste; and pleasant, lingering sweetness.
Intimacy Teas: Dragon Well Superior
China, the birthplace of tea, gifts the world with a dizzying abundance of gorgeous iterations of Camellia sinensis. Dragon Well, also called Long Jing, may be its most famous. This tea, once enjoyed exclusively by royal families in ancient China, yields a golden brew with a distinct nutty aroma and full, round flavor when brewed. It’s a lovely choice for Valentine’s Day, as well as Chinese New Year. Dragon Well represent tea artisanship at a high level. It also contains the highest concentration of catechins among Chinese green teas. Catechins are potent antioxidants that neutralize free radicals, which are unstable molecules that can cause cellular damage. Among other things, they support heart health—a big bonus for Valentine’s Day! And that heart—its health is essential for many years of intimacy between partners.
Intimacy Teas: Sui Yue Liu Xiang Puerh
We trumpet the gifting and brewing of pu-erh on Valentine’s Day. The style, the only tea undergoes fermentation, grows complex with age. Just like strong relationships! This pu-erh, which means “The Fragrance of the Age” in Chinese, brews strong and mysterious, with earth notes of pipe tobacco combined with a subtle citrus zip. From Yunnan Province, the heart of pu-erh production, our Sui Yue Lie Xiang Puerh can be re-infused more than a dozen times in the gong-fu style. This dramatically increases the lifespan of a the tea! It also stands as a superb candidate for aging in dry Colorado or many other Western states. We find that sipping and inhaling the aromas of pu-erh can bring people together—that is, it can spark intimacy.
Intimacy Teas: Bi Tan Piao Xue
Flowers figure into Valentine’s Day, of course. We offer a multitude of teas containing different petals and blossoms, and many of them align crisply with Valentine’s Day. Bi Tan Piao Xue, the highest expression of jasmine green tea on the market, may serve as our favorite. It means “Snow Flakes Falling Upon a Jade Pond,” which may be the most beautifully evocative name for a tea in history—really, for any food product. The name refers to the appearance of the tiny, silver-lined tea buds, the green tea, the tender jasmine flowers and the transportive experience of drinking this treasure. The green tea comes from Mountain Meng, one of the most ancient tea mountains in China.
Brew this together on a chilly weekend February morning—perhaps even Valentine’s Day, on Saturday. And then spend the rest of the day doting upon each other.
