Yunnan Sourcing 自有品牌
Yunnan Sourcing label
Own pu'er label of the retailer Yunnan Sourcing (Kunming; founder Scott Wilson). Single-village cakes pressed every year since 2009.
- Kind
- company
- Based in
- Kunming
- Founded
- 2009
- Brands
- Yunnan Sourcing (own label)
History#
- 2004Scott Wilson moves to China; retail business (initially on eBay) begins.
- 2009First own-label cakes, with Rui Cao Xiang; You Le Zhi Chun pressed 4 June.
- 2013Pesticide testing of YS-brand pu'er under EU MRLs from autumn.
- 2014Label releasing 30+ pu'ers a year.
Also sold or written as 5#
Translations and trade names
- Yunnan Sourcing Brand
- Yunnan Sourcing / Rui Cao Xiang2009 co-label with a Korean partner, under which the first YS cakes appeared.
- Yunnan Sourcing (own label)
Abbreviations
- YS
Russian
- Yunnan Sourcing (собственная марка)
Names and ambiguities#
Notes#
This producer record covers the own-brand pressings. The shop that sells them, and many other makers' teas, is the vendor 'yunnan-sourcing'; listings from that vendor credit other producers unless the wrapper says Yunnan Sourcing. Scott Wilson, an American who first stayed in Yunnan in 1998-1999, moved back to China in 2004. The business started as an eBay store and launched yunnansourcing.com and yunnansourcing.us around 2009 (Tea Epicure, TeaDB); the shop's front page says it has traded 'since 2004' and is signed by Scott Wilson and 小瑶. Tea Epicure describes a tea room at the Kunming wholesale tea market.
TeaDB placed storage in Kunming and Portland in 2014, and in 2015 said the US branch was in Bend. Own-label production began in spring 2009 with a co-label shared with the Korean company Rui Cao Xiang. Its second cake, You Le Zhi Chun, came from 100-200-year-old trees at Long Pa village on Youle Mountain and was pressed on 4 June 2009 (280 cakes of 357 g). By 2014 the label released more than 30 pu'ers a year, and from autumn 2013 it tested them for pesticides against EU limits. Listings describe single-village sourcing and hand-processed sun-dried maocha.
For example, the 2019 Pasha old-arbor cake was spring material processed in April 2019 and made into 150 cakes of 200 g. The listings do not name the pressing site, so 'kunming' is the label's base, not necessarily where the leaf was processed.