Uji: The Source of Matcha

Uji has been producing Japan's finest matcha for over eight hundred years. The city south of Kyoto sits in a valley where morning river mist and mineral-rich soil create conditions that cannot be replicated anywhere else. Tencha — the shade-grown leaf that becomes matcha when ground — is harvested here once a year, in May, and the best lots are reserved for a handful of families who have been working the same fields since the Muromachi period.

This half-day begins among the tea rows: your guide will explain how shade netting is stretched over the plants in the weeks before harvest, how this slows photosynthesis and drives up the chlorophyll that gives high-grade matcha its vivid colour and characteristic umami sweetness. From the fields, you move to a working mill house, where you will grind dried tencha on a stone mill — thirty minutes of slow turning for roughly twenty grams of powder. The session ends at a tea house overlooking the Uji River, where you prepare and taste three grades of matcha side by side, and work through a selection of Uji-made confections whose sweetness is calibrated specifically to the bitterness of the cup.

Highlights

• —Guided walk through working Uji tea fields with explanation of shade-growing and harvest
• —Hands-on stone-mill grinding of dried tencha leaf into fresh matcha powder
• —Comparative tasting of three matcha grades — ceremonial, premium, and culinary — prepared at the table
• —Tea house session overlooking the Uji River with locally made wagashi confections