Country
France
France grows almost no tea and has done more to shape what Europe drinks than most of the countries that do. Paris is where tea was turned into a catalogued luxury, by houses that took their vocabulary from wine and their technique from perfumery, and the scented and flavoured blends that came out of that are now the house style of specialty shops from Berlin to Tokyo. France also grows the other half of the shelf, the infusion crops of Provence and the Drôme, and that part is a real agricultural claim.
What grows here
Two answers that do not overlap. Camellia sinensis barely: one established micro-plantation, Filleule des Fées at Languidic in the Blavet valley in Morbihan, on acid granite ground with Atlantic mist, planted since 2006 as a collection of many cultivars rather than a monoculture, plus a handful of experimental plots elsewhere. Infusion crops properly: linden from the Baronnies in the Drôme, still hand-gathered off the trees, along with lavender, verbena and thyme across Provence. Everything else carrying a French name is blended in France from leaf grown somewhere else, which is the honest way to read a Paris house's Darjeeling or its Chinese green.
How it is made here
Scenting and flavouring, approached as a perfumer would rather than as a tea maker would. The French method composes: a chosen base, named aromatics layered over it and a finished blend treated as an authored work with a proper name rather than a description of its contents. It is also why the base is often deliberately quiet, since a leaf with strong opinions fights the top note. Whether that is an improvement on drinking the leaf straight is a matter of taste. That it set the template for European specialty tea retail is not really arguable.
What to look for
Read a French tea house as a selector, not a grower. A Paris name on a Darjeeling tells you who chose and packed it and nothing about the garden, and the serious houses will name the garden when asked. On flavoured blends the question is the one Earl Grey raises: cold-pressed natural oil or synthetic aroma, and whether the base underneath is a real tea or a carrier for the flavour. French-grown tea does exist and is made in tiny lots, so a French-grown claim attached to any real volume is worth pressing hard.
How it got here
Tea came in under Louis XIV with the French East India Company and stayed a court and apothecary curiosity while coffee took the cafés, which is why France never became a tea-drinking nation in the British sense. Mariage Frères was founded in Paris in 1854, out of a family already generations into the trade, and spent more than a century as a wholesale importer supplying hotels. The turn came in 1983, when it reopened as a retail tea house and salon in the Marais. Palais des Thés and others followed, and the Paris model was copied across Europe and into Japan within a decade.