Country
Argentina
Argentina is a large tea producer whose own population barely drinks tea. Nearly the whole crop is machine-harvested CTC black from Misiones province, and most of it goes north to be turned into iced tea in the United States, where Argentina supplies close to half the black tea imported. It is bought for a technical property rather than for flavour: it takes colour well and stays clear when it is chilled, which is what a bottling line needs.
What grows here
Black CTC and effectively nothing else, from Misiones in the far northeast and from neighbouring parts of Corrientes. There is no regional hierarchy, no garden names and no specialty sector to speak of. The same red-soil farms grow yerba mate, which is what Argentines actually drink, and tea is the second crop on the same ground with much of the same machinery.
The ground
The Paraná plateau: deep red lateritic soil, subtropical, low altitude at a few hundred metres and generously rained on. It is ground for volume rather than for concentration, and the low elevation and fast growth are what give the light, uncomplicated liquor the iced-tea trade wants. Winter frost stops the crop dead and is the one real constraint on the calendar.
The bushes
Unselected seedling stock, assamica-leaning and grown from seed rather than propagated clonally, with no cultivar identity anyone trades on. That is an outcome rather than an oversight. A buyer purchasing by the container for a bottling line is specifying colour, clarity and price, and a named cultivar would add cost without adding anything they are paying for.
Harvest seasons
Southern hemisphere summer, roughly October to April or May, then a full winter stop. Rounds are long by the standards of a hand-plucked origin because the harvesters cut everything at once, and the crop moves on contract rather than by season, so nothing here carries a vintage.
How it is made here
Mechanised end to end, and that is the whole story. Self-propelled and tractor-mounted harvesters cut the field, which delivers a coarse mixed leaf with stalk in it, and the CTC line turns that into granules. It is probably the most fully industrialised tea production anywhere, because Argentine labour costs never allowed anything else, and it is honest about what it is: an ingredient made to a specification.
What to look for
You will not find this tea sold as an origin, and if you have drunk bottled or powdered iced tea in North America you have very likely drunk it without being told. Where it does appear as loose leaf, judge it as a base for iced or flavoured tea rather than as a single origin, because it was not made to be one. There is nothing here to be defrauded about, which is unusual enough to be worth saying.
How it got here
Tea seed reached Argentina in the 1920s and the plant took to the Misiones red soil that was already growing yerba mate. The industry scaled after 1951, when a ban on tea imports closed off foreign leaf and handed domestic production a captive market. What it became after that was decided abroad: the growth of iced and ready-to-drink tea in the United States created demand for cheap, clear-brewing black tea in bulk, and Argentina built itself to fill exactly that order.