Wild Cherry Tea

The distinctive taste of fruity, sweet wild cherries blends perfectly with the fine quality Keemun black tea in this very popular fruit tea.

Prunus Aviun, or wild cherry is a fleshy stone fruit, or drupe. Prunus Aviunis also called the sweet cherry although in Britain it tends to be referred to as wild cherry. The word cherry derives from the old French ‘Cherise’ which comes from the Latin Cerasum which refers to a region of Greece from which cherries were first exported to Europe. We know that cherries have been eaten in Europe, Asia and north Africa since prehistoric times. Cherries were first introduced into the UK by order of King Henry VIII who had them first planted at Teynham near Sittingbourne in Kent. The King had tasted them in Flanders and enjoyed them so much that he had them specially shipped to England for cultivation.

Different species of cherry, like coffee, tend not to cross pollinate and the majority of cherries are picked by hand to avoid damaging the fruit and the trees and therefore are a fairly expensive fruit to purchase. In this country cherries have a fairly short growing season with the peak harvest time being mid-July. Cherry trees are quite difficult to grow and keep alive and are prone to infestations from aphids, fruit flies and canker. Turkey is the worlds largest producer of cherry, producing about 20% of the 2.25 million tonnes of sweet cherries produced globally. The top four producers of sweet cherries are Turkey, the US, Iran and Spain. [Source: The UNFAO].

Raw sweet cherries contain 16% carbohydrate, 1% protein and are negligible in fat, they contain little nutrients and are approximately 82% water.

Cherry oil is made using the pips of cherry and is applied to the tea at approximately 1gramme of oil per 1kilogram of tea. We launched our wild cherry tea over 30 years ago and it has always been very popular with many of our customers. Comments that people have made show that many brew this tea and then chill it down to make a beautifully flavoured iced tea and that it goes very well indeed with salads. We use a good quality black Keemun tea as a base because of its smoothness and gentle, slightly astringent flavour.

Ingredients: Black Tea, Blackberry leaves, natural cherry flavouring, wild cherry flavouring.