Country
Georgia
Georgia grew tea for the Russian empire and then for the Soviet Union, and by the end of that period it was supplying most of the tea grown in the Soviet Union. The industry collapsed with the state in the early 1990s and the plantations were simply left. What makes Georgia interesting now is what happened next: thirty years of unpruned, unsprayed bushes standing in abandoned fields, which a small revival sector is reclaiming plot by plot.
What grows here
The tea is all in the west, on the Black Sea side of the country. Guria, around Ozurgeti, was the historic heart and is where most of the revival sits. Adjara, around Chakvi and Kobuleti north of Batumi, is where the industry was professionalised and where the oldest plantations survive. Samegrelo and Imereti carried large Soviet-era plantings inland. Abkhazia, which produced a substantial share, has been outside Georgian control since the war of the early 1990s. Black tea is still the bulk of it, with the revival makers adding hand-made green, white and oolong.
The ground
Humid subtropical, at around forty-two degrees north, which is far outside the normal latitude for tea and works only because the sea and the Caucasus shelter this strip. Rainfall is heavy and spread through the year, and the soils are the acidic red and yellow lateritic ground the plant likes. The winters are real: the bushes go properly dormant and snow is not unusual, so growth is slow and the season is short. Georgian growers make the argument any dormant-season origin makes, that a bush which stops has more to put into the first picking.
The bushes
Chinese sinensis seed, brought in during the nineteenth century and then selected hard for cold tolerance, underlies nearly everything planted. Soviet breeding at the research station in Ozurgeti produced named Georgian selections, Kolkhida the best known. Because so much of the area was seed-grown rather than clonal and was then abandoned, what stands in an old plantation today is a genetically mixed population rather than rows of one thing. Several revival producers treat that variability as the material rather than as a defect.
Harvest seasons
May to September or October, with a hard stop over winter. The May picking is where the revival producers put their effort and the later cuts are progressively coarser. Soviet planning ignored the distinction and took whatever the machines could reach, which is a large part of how the tea got the reputation it did.
How it is made here
The Soviet system was built around machine harvesting and high-throughput factories making broken black tea by the trainload, blended with imported leaf before it reached a shelf. Almost none of that plant survives in working order. What is made now is orthodox and largely by hand, in small workshops, by producers who mostly learned the process recently rather than inheriting it. That is why Georgian tea today spans hand-rolled green, white and oolong, none of which the country made in its industrial period.
What to look for
Very little tea sold in Georgia is Georgian. Domestic packers have long blended imported leaf, so a Georgian brand name is not an origin claim and a producer name is. Treat wild Georgian tea carefully as well: leaf from abandoned plantations is feral rather than wild, which is a real and interesting distinction but not a botanical one. Output is very small, so a low price and a large quantity together are a warning. Ask which plot, which year and who made it, because at this scale a producer can actually answer.
How it got here
Georgian tea became serious in the 1890s, when the Chinese tea master Liu Junzhou, known in Georgia as Lau Djan Djau, was brought to Chakvi by a Russian tea merchant and stayed to build the industry there. His tea took a gold medal at the Paris exposition of 1900. Under the Soviet Union Georgia became the system's tea supplier, with quality subordinated to plan targets. The end of the union and the war in Abkhazia took the market and a major producing region together, and the plantations were abandoned within a few years. A rehabilitation programme from the mid 2010s and a handful of small private producers are what remains.
Places in Georgia
Named places inside Georgia. The ones with a page of their own are links.