Grape Green Tea: Raisin, Not Fresh Fruit, and How to Brew

The grape (putao, 葡萄) came to China along the Silk Road more than two thousand years ago and settled in the north-west: Xinjiang and Turpan are still the country’s grape land, famous for the sweetest raisins.

Taste and aroma in tea

In the Chinese tea classics the grape is a newcomer from modern blends. It claims no ancient pedigree; it simply works in the cup. A grape note gives green tea a fresh berry sweetness with a light tang, making the blend bright and summery. Grape sounds especially good next to floral aromas such as jasmine: the flowers carry the top note, the berry fills the juicy middle.

In the Chinese tradition

Though grapes reached the teapot only recently, they have long been at home in Chinese culture: a bunch of grapes stands for abundance and a large family, a frequent motif on porcelain and carved wood. Turpan grapes are sung about in folk songs, and the grape arbour is a classic of the Uyghur courtyard.

How to brew

Green-based grape blends like soft water at 80–85 °C and short steeps: the berry sweetness stays fresh and the green leaf never turns bitter. This tea is also excellent iced.
You can taste it in action in our grape jasmine green tea - juicy sweetness over a fresh jasmine base (more in the green tea collection).

How it's harvested and prepared

In tea, "grape" almost always means the dried grape - the raisin. Grapes are hand-picked in late summer to early autumn, once they hit peak sweetness; the classic raisin grape is Thompson Seedless, cut from the vine in California's San Joaquin Valley through August and September. The bunches leave the vine sweet and green, and the sun does the rest.

The traditional California method is simple: the bunches are laid on paper trays right on the ground between the vine rows and sun-dried for two to three weeks, turned so they colour evenly, until the fruit darkens and most of its water is gone. After that they are de-stemmed, cleaned, sorted and given a whisper of vegetable oil for gloss. The dark, sun-dried raisin takes its colour from the drying itself - fruit and sunlight. Golden raisins go another route: a little sulphur dioxide holds that pale colour in place. Anyone who wants raisins without sulphites reaches for the dark, sun-dried kind. Turpan does it the other way round: bunches hang for about forty days in latticed mud-brick drying houses, in shade and moving air - that is how the famous pale-green Xinjiang raisin keeps its colour without any sulphur.

On our shelf

Grape flavours two teas we keep in stock: our jasmine grape green tea, where juicy sweetness rides a fresh jasmine base, and the caffeine-free floral & fruit blend, where it joins rose, peach and orange. In the blend builder grape is a ฿40 add-on - it loves a green base and sits happily next to jasmine or peach.

Is the grape in tea fresh or dried?

Dried, essentially always. Fresh grapes hold too much water to survive blending or steeping, so tea uses the raisin or the small dried currant, picked at peak sweetness and dried down by sun and warm ground. Roughly four to five kilos of fresh grapes go into a single kilo of raisins, which is why the sweetness lands so concentrated in the cup.