Narino

Narino is a matcha and tencha cultivar belonging to a single garden. It was mass-selected, not bred by cross, out of the seed-grown (zairai) tea trees of Horii Shichimeien’s Okunoyama garden in Uji, and registered under Japan’s Plant Variety Protection Act in 2002. Unlike almost every other cultivar in this collection, it has no prefectural or national breeding programme behind it — it does not appear on Kyoto Prefecture’s table of recommended Uji cultivars or in NARO’s own handbook of nationally released tea cultivars — and, as far as we have been able to determine, it is grown nowhere but Okunoyama and sold by no one but Horii Shichimeien. Its defining trait is compositional: a theanine content Horii states runs close to double that of conventional matcha cultivars.

Lineage

• Uji zairai seedling, Okunoyama garden (奥ノ山茶園) — a mass selection from a seed-grown, non-clonal population, not a controlled cross. No pollen parent is recorded or recoverable.

This is the same kind of lineage as Yabukita’s — an individual pulled out of a genetically mixed zairai stand — but conducted almost a century later, on the private stock of a single Uji garden rather than a farmer’s cleared field. Its closest relative is Okunoyama (奥の山, written with the hiragana の for the cultivar, distinct from 奥ノ山 with katakana ノ for the garden both were selected from): a sibling selection made from the same trees in the same 1980–2000 screening, kept for its dark leaf colour rather than its amino-acid profile. Narino and Okunoyama are routinely sold and discussed as a pair, but they are two separately registered cultivars with two different grounds for registration.

History

Horii Shichimeien, founded in 1879, has stewarded the Okunoyama garden since acquiring it in the mid-Meiji period. The garden is seed-grown zairai — every tree genetically its own individual — and Horii’s own materials describe it as continuing from the Muromachi period, the last surviving example of the “Uji Shichimeien,” the seven historic tea gardens of Uji. That antiquity is not only house lore: a 2019 soil-science paper (Inoue et al., Japanese Journal of Soil Science and Plant Nutrition) applied AMS radiocarbon dating to the soil beneath Okunoyama’s traditional straw-and-reed shading beds and put the establishment of that shading system in the first half of the 15th century — about 150 years earlier than documentary sources had suggested. The dating covers the shading system itself, not the planting date of any individual tea tree, so it corroborates the garden’s age without directly dating Narino’s source trees.

Starting in 1980, the fifth-generation head, Horii Nobuo, spent twenty years working through the garden’s zairai trees to find individuals worth carrying forward. We could not independently verify a candidate-narrowing count or a single selection year for that process beyond Horii’s own description of it as a twenty-year screening; what is documented is the outcome — two named selections, Narino and Okunoyama — and the basis on which Narino was registered: component analysis of its leaf showed theanine at close to double the level of conventional cultivars, and Horii states that measurement was what carried the registration. Narino was registered on 14 November 2002 under the Plant Variety Protection Act (種苗法) as registered variety No. 10751, on an application filed 13 March 2000 — a route distinct from both the MAFF Cha Norin national trial system (Narino is absent from NARO’s own cultivar handbook of nationally released selections) and a prefectural recommended-cultivar listing (it is likewise absent from Kyoto Prefecture’s official table of Uji 茶奨励品種). The breeder’s right was held by Horii Nobuo personally rather than by the company, and MAFF records it as having lapsed on 15 November 2011, well short of its nominal 25-year term; the cultivar is still grown and marketed as a proprietary, single-garden one. A more selectively picked and processed grade is sold alongside the standard line as Premium Narino (プレミアム成里乃).

Characteristics

Budding time is recorded as medium (中生) — MAFF’s registered-variety description gives both the budding period and the picking period as 中, and the Japanese cultivar reference 日本茶備忘録 lists it the same way; no figure in days relative to Yabukita, no yield data and no disease-resistance ratings appear to have been published for Narino, which is unsurprising for a cultivar with no institutional trial record behind it.

Narino is grown and processed exclusively as tencha for matcha. At Okunoyama it is picked as the first flush, by hand, after 40 days under tana (trellis) shading with kanreisha netting — longer than the 20–30 days typical of shaded sencha, though within the range used for tencha and gyokuro — before stone-grinding.

The trait the cultivar is registered for is compositional rather than morphological: Horii Shichimeien states Narino’s theanine — the amino acid behind matcha’s umami — runs close to double the level of conventional cultivars, while the tea shows comparatively little of the bitterness and astringency that level would normally bring with it. In the cup that shows up as pronounced sweetness and a heavy, rounded umami; Horii’s own marketing describes it as drinkable on its own, without the wagashi usually paired with a strong matcha. That is the producer’s characterisation rather than an independently published sensory analysis, and should be read accordingly — but it is consistent with the theanine figure being the one component of Narino’s profile that was documented well enough to register the cultivar in the first place.