French Tea People Promote Chinese Pu’er Tea

Wenzhuo Liu

French man William Osmont settled in Yunnan, China, with a background in agricultural machinery education. He helped his wife Yubai, a tea farmer, whose family has been tea farmers for generations, William establish the Yunnan tea brand Farmerleaf and gradually expand into the international market. William mainly promotes through social media. In 2023, he organized a European tour to promote his own brand of tea, holding small meetings with local tea enthusiasts in more than ten cities across Europe.

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American works as Tea Makers in Europe

Wenzhuo Liu

Photo Andy LeGresley

Alicia Gentili, an American with a Bachelors degree in Socioe conomics, gradually transformed into a new tea maker in Europe through multiple encounters with tea. As a project manager, Alicia worked at a tea plantation in Jersey, UK for over two years, accumulating knowledge of tea production through practical experience. In 2022, she began providing tea processing services and consulting Alicia Gentili Tea Consulting in Europe, and during the tea season, she went to tea plantations of customers in various European countries to help with tea processing and production.

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Tea Science Popularization Social Media Expert- Tea Science PhD Student

Wenzhuo Liu

Dylan Rothenberg, a doctoral student at South China Agricultural University in Guangzhou, is from the United States and studies soil health and microorganisms in organic tea plantations. 2023-2024 is already his last academic year as a doctoral student. After graduation, he plans to continue his beloved research work. In his spare time, Dylan is also a social media tea expert, Wu Mountain Tea, teaching Chinese tea and tea culture in English. He obtained the qualification of an intermediate tea evaluator and also translated the terms of sensory evaluation of tea by himself. He hopes that more people in the world will understand the system for evaluating tea and promote its internationalization.

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Dutch Tea Plantation- Het Zyuderblad

Wenzhuo Liu and Linda Cebrian Rampen

Good news for Chinese readers: related article has been published in the July 2021 <Tea Times 茶博览> tea magazine in Chinese, 观茶者专栏-Het Zyuderblad茶园:分享一杯荷兰好茶”. 


Het Zuderblad tea plantation is the first tea garden in the Netherlands. Linda Cebrian Rampen is the owner of this tea garden. The tea garden is located in Soerendonk, in the south of the Netherlands, near the Belgian border. Linda’s family has run the farm for generations. As the only daughter of her parents, she inherited the farm and developed a tea garden through her own efforts. After a lot of reading research and travel investigation in the previous two years, Linda successfully achieved the first goal of the tea garden in 2015, planting 120 tea trees for outdoor experiments. In 2017, she planted 2000 tea trees in the second batch, and continued to expand in 2018, planting 1000 more tea trees in the garden. The next batch of tea seedlings of different varieties are cultivated in the greenhouse in order to select tea varieties that are more suitable for the Dutch climate. Linda is confident about the future of her tea garden.

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Tea Magazine in German- Olaf Tarmas

Article Wenzhuo Liu

Photo Odile Hain

Olaf Tarmas is a professional journalist in Hamburg, Germany. As a student, he worked in a tea shop and became attached to tea. During his career and personal travel, he visited several tea producing places and traditional tea drinking areas in Asia and Europe. He, together with some tea people in German speaking areas and several organizers of Berlin Tea Festival, launched the first German tea magazine t-Magazin in March 2022. In April, C*Space, a shared space in Berlin, Germany, held a press conference for the magazine. In October, it helped organize the Pop-up event Berlin Tea Festival.

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the Tea Road of German Product Designer

Wenzhuo Liu

German product designer Maurice Eric Zacher fell in love with drinking tea many years ago. He was familiar with tea sets, and has designed and transformed many tea sets. After studying and working in Japan intermittently for many years, he was not only keen on tasting tea, tea and tea food, but also visited many tea houses and collected tea sets. At the end of 2020, he returned to Germany and began to plant tea trees, now there are hundreds of tea seedlings of different varieties on his big balcony. This spring, he also picked fresh tea leaves and made steamed green tea. In the future, he will launch more design projects related to tea, establish a tea garden in Hesse, Germany, and produce Japanese green tea or Chinese white tea.

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The Past and Future of the First European Tea Plantation – São Miguel

Wenzhuo Liu

Good news for Chinese readers: related article has been published in Wenzhuo‘s column Tea Perspectives of April 2022 <Tea Times 茶博览> tea magazine in Chinese, 观茶者专栏-欧洲第一个茶园的过去和未来”.


As a decorative plant, tea was introduced to São Miguel island by Jacinto Leite, a native of the Azores in Portugal in 1820. It is the administrative capital of the Azores in the central part of the North Atlantic. Among the tea tree varieties brought to the island, only small leaf tea trees are well adapted to the climate and soil of the island. With the decline of the important pillar orange orchard agricultural industry on the island caused by diseases and insect pests from 1840 to 1875, tobacco, sugar beet, pineapple and tea were included in the experiment as alternative economic industries. In 1878 and 1891, two groups of Chinese tea industry experts were invited to the island to guide tea planting and tea processing, and the tea industry was successfully developed. At the beginning of the 20th century, the island had nearly 50 tea gardens and 10 independent factories exporting tea, which played an important role in the island’s economy. An important part of the island’s economy has been established around the planting, processing and export of tea. At that time, São Miguel island also became the only tea producing area in Europe. However, since the 1960s, the impact of the development of the international tea industry chain on the local tea industry, the shortage of local agricultural labor force, and the local policies to increase milk production have accelerated the decline of the whole tea industry on the island. At present, only two tea gardens with a total area of 25 hectares are still in operation, each with tea factories, mainly producing green tea and black tea. Where will the tea industry of São Miguel Island, which has developed for almost three centuries, and the tea culture derived from it go in the future?

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Portuguese Tea Garden – Chá Camélia

Wenzhuo Liu

Good news for Chinese readers: related article has been published in Wenzhuo‘s column Tea Perspectives of March 2022 <Tea Times 茶博览> tea magazine in Chinese, 观茶者专栏-Nina Gruntkowski的葡萄牙酒庄茶园”.


German Nina Gruntkowski moved to Portugal 15 years ago as a Portuguese journalist of German radio broadcast. In an interview in 2011, Peter Oppliger, who initiated the Swiss tea garden in Ascona, gave her a tea tree. She has always dreamed of making more real and touchable products than radio, so she came up with the idea of planting tea trees. Nina first obtained 200 asexually propagated tea seedlings from Peter and planted them in her garden. In 2013, she transformed an old family vineyard into a tea plantation and cooperated with a Camellia expert. They used tea seeds for sexual reproduction and cuttings of mother trees of different small leaf species found in Portugal for asexual reproduction, and successfully developed 12000 clumps of tea trees on the land covering an area of 1 hectare. After more than 10 years of careful cultivation and management, some tea trees can be picked. They mainly produce steamed green tea, and the output is also increasing year by year. In 2019, 12kg, 2020, 50kg, 2021, in addition to 85kg steamed green tea, Nina also began to try to produce a small amount of Oolong tea.

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Online Tea Class – UK Tea Academy

Wenzhuo Liu

Good news for Chinese readers: related article has been published in Wenzhuo‘s column Tea Perspectives of February 2022 <Tea Times 茶博览> tea magazine in Chinese, 观茶者专栏-Jane Pettigrew:英国茶学院线上茶课的推动者”.


Jane Pettigrew, who has 39 years of experience in tea industry, tea practitioners who are familiar with her and the British tea associations organizations, gradually realised the importance of professional tea training in the food and beverage (service) industry. In 2015, Jane launched her influence in the tea circle for many years to form a team, established the UK Tea Academy (UKTA) with investor funding, and successfully operated in the UK. Since 2017 UKTA has had licenced tutors teaching the UKTA courses in Italy, Spain, South Korea, France and Germany. Soon after the start of COVID-19 in 2020, UKTA adapted its work to online classes, and now teaches students from all over the world.

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Tea Hiker on the Ancient Tea Horse Road

Wenzhuo Liu

Good news for Chinese readers: related article has been published in Wenzhuo‘s column Tea Perspectives of January 2022 <Tea Times 茶博览> tea magazine in Chinese, 观茶者专栏-Jeff Fuchs:行走于茶马古道上的徒步者”.


Jeff Fuchs, who has lived in Shangri La, Yunnan for ten years, has 17 years of experience in recording and exploring trade routes in the Himalayas and visiting trade participants. He always takes tea and teapots when traveling. His photographic documentary book <Ancient Tea Horse Road> has recorded that he and his team walked along the ancient tea horse road on the Yunnan Tibet line. Based on his book, the documentary of the same name made by Canadian director Andrew Gregg won the documentary award. Jeff has organized and participated in more than 30 Himalayan expeditions, and he has won many Explorer awards such as recently as one of the “100 greatest explorers in Canada” by the Royal Geographical Society of Canada.

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