The Organic Tea Garden That Reset My Understanding of Matcha

During one of my several trips to Korea, I visited Jeju Island. On the island, I, with my wife, took a bus ride down to Orteas organic tea garden. 

In that garden, I drank the best matcha latte I have ever tasted. The matcha was vibrant and coastal green, and not too bitter at all. A tad earthy and umami. Combined with milk, the drink was creamy, grassy, and sweet.

This kind of complex yet clean flavor usually comes only from proper shade-grown young leaves. Two weeks before harvest, the leaves are shielded from much of the sunlight, and this pushes them to be softer and sweeter.

Jeju island is unusually suitable for matcha-grade tea. Ocean breeze, mild winters, volcanic soil, and plenty of canopy to filter light. In this organic tea garden, tea shrubs line the field in steady rows, but nothing about it feels industrial. You walk in and you see and feel everything.

The green tea leaves that matcha is made of comes from the camellia sinensis plant, a perennial shrub that generally prefers partial/filtered sun but tolerates full sun in cooler highlands like Japan or Korea. 

But wait, I just said before that matcha is made by adding shade in the final two weeks. Yes, but shade is used only to boost internal leaf chemistry, not because the plant dislikes sun.

During the shading:

• chlorophyll increases
• L-theanine levels rise
• bitterness decreases
• color becomes deeper green
• umami increases

Put simply, these plants do not prefer the dark; the darkness is used to modify taste. Going further, matcha, sencha, black tea, oolong, hojicha, and every other tea all come from this same shrub. The differences arise from processing, not plant type.

Drinking it, I realized how rare it is for food to feel aligned with its origin. Not nostalgic. Just true. No residue. No drag. My body felt light afterward. That’s the vitality signal, the real one. Not nutrition theory, but direct perception.

I love gastronomy! And how it combines with ecology/nature. How food grows in nature as part of an integrated system to provide a multi-dimensional array of benefits to the body.