Crystal Leaves

The glass frosts over before you have touched it, and the leaves keep rising.

The tea is served in a glass so cold it clouds, and the leaves inside it are still moving. Spearmint opens the composition, sweet and cool and unambiguously green, the leaf crushed between finger and thumb rather than the toothpaste version. It is a clean, almost crystalline start. Then the heart takes an unexpected turn: longoza, a wild ginger lily from Madagascar, distilled by Maison Lautier. It smells of a flower that grows by water, white and spicy and slightly camphorous, with a green stem running through it. It gives the mint somewhere to go. The base is a lemon leaves accord, the bitter-fresh smell of the citrus tree itself rather than its fruit, with a faint tea-like dryness. Nothing here is heavy. Everything here is transparent. You drink it too fast, and the cold sits in your chest like a held breath.