The short answer
Most tea is picked in seasonal waves, and the waves differ by category. For Chinese green teas the spring window defines the entire year - the finest lots are picked in a few weeks, and availability, price and character all move together. Oolongs have spring and autumn rounds; blacks vary by region but are steadier; whites concentrate in spring; puer presses follow spring and autumn leaf; jasmine tea is a two-harvest story because its base and its flowers bloom at different times. The buyer's job is therefore not to react to the season but to schedule against it: place orders before the window, confirm production inside it, and let transit do the rest. This note gives a category-by-category calendar and a backward-planning method that turns it into order dates. The goal is simple: never let the first conversation about a spring lot happen after the lot already exists.
The spring window, and why it rules the year
Chinese green teas - Longjing, Biluochun, Anji white, Maofeng - are judged largely by picking date, and the trade encodes this in shorthand. Lots picked before the Qingming festival in early April are called mingqian; those picked before Grain Rain in late April, yuqian. Earlier picking generally means more tenderness, a softer liquor and a shorter supply, which is why these lots are pre-booked: buyers who wait for finished tea are choosing from what others did not take. Arrival pressure builds through April and May, when the year's spring production is processed, packed and moving to ports. The mechanics of that window - what can be reserved before picking, how reference samples from the previous season work, and how lead times stack - are covered in the spring harvest note, and the flagship example of the category is on the Longjing page. Mingqian and yuqian are claims about a calendar, not certificates of quality - the cup still decides. But the calendar shapes the cup: earlier picks are tenderer, smaller in volume and more contested, and the same cultivar picked two weeks later brews a different tea. Buyers who learn the window once find that most green tea conversations become easy, because half the vocabulary turns out to be dates.
A calendar by category
| Category | Picking pattern (qualitative) | Buying implication |
|---|---|---|
| Green teas (Longjing, Biluochun, Anji, Maofeng) | Spring defines the year; earliest picks carry the premium | Pre-book before spring; expect April-May arrival pressure |
| Jasmine tea | Green base from spring; scenting rounds follow the jasmine blossom season | Finished lots land later in the year - order early for holiday retail |
| Oolongs (Anxi, Wuyi, Chaozhou) | Spring and autumn rounds; spring for body, autumn for aroma in many lots; roasted styles rest after firing | Two entry points a year; allow resting time for roasted lots |
| Black teas (Keemun, Dianhong, lapsang) | Regional rounds, generally steadier across the year than greens | Easier calendar; still better value booked around regional peaks |
| White teas (Silver Needle, White Peony, Shoumei) | Spring is the primary harvest; later pickings feed aging programs | Buy spring for delicate profiles; aged programs buy with a storage plan |
| Puer (raw and ripe cakes) | Spring and autumn leaf feed the presses; ripe tea rests after piling | Plan press dates plus resting time before shipment |
| Herbal and fruit blends | Ingredient-driven rather than leaf-driven; less seasonal | Order on consumption, not on harvest |
Two entries deserve a second look. Jasmine is a compound product: the green tea base is made in spring, and the scenting rounds happen when jasmine flowers are available, so the finished tea's calendar is the sum of two harvests. And matcha is a milling story: the shade-grown spring leaf sets the year's production calendar, and grinding capacity through the following months is what a buyer actually reserves - covered in the matcha supply note. The table is a planning instrument, not a straitjacket: lots outside the flagship window are not lesser tea so much as differently priced tea, and many programs are happier on later-pick material with a steadier budget. What the table forbids is expecting spring character from an autumn lot - the mismatch shows in the cup long before it shows in a complaint.
Holding the harvest: seasonality meets shelf life
The calendar's corollary is that most of the year's green tea is drunk months after picking, which makes storage part of buying. Well-packed spring lots - foil liners, nitrogen flush, cool and dark warehousing - hold their character across the year, and that is exactly how year-round supply of a spring product works. The packing decisions belong to the order, not to the warehouse afterward: nitrogen flushing for retail packs, oxygen-barrier liners for bulk, and a warehouse discipline that keeps heat and odors away. The specifics live in the green tea shelf-life note, the nitrogen flushing note and the warehouse conditions note. Buyers who treat storage as a specification line get spring character in December; buyers who leave it to chance get a lesson in enzymatic chemistry. Restocking logic follows the same thread: a buyer who knows both the consumption rate and the shelf behavior can hold a slightly larger buffer of spring greens through the year and buy less often, trading a little warehouse cost for a lot of consistency.
Planning backward from your shelf date
The calendar becomes usable when run in reverse:
- Fix the date the tea must be on your shelf or menu.
- Subtract receiving and distribution.
- Subtract transit - reference ranges run 15-25 days by sea to the US West Coast and 30-45 to Europe, 5-10 by air.
- Subtract production - stock lines 10-15 working days, private label 20-35 days, new blends 35-60 days.
- Subtract the sample cycle, and for spring teas add the harvest window as the fixed starting gun.
For a spring green tea landing in Europe for a summer launch, this lands the order confirmation in late winter - which is precisely when serious buyers are booking. Reference MOQs and lead-time ranges for every step sit on the MOQ and lead-time page, and the desk confirms harvest-linked schedules in writing per program through the quote form. Run the same backward pass twice a year - once before spring bookings, once before the autumn oolong rounds - and the calendar stops generating urgencies and starts generating order dates.