Place · in Kerala
Munnar
Munnar is the most conspicuous tea country in southern India: the whole High Range is planted, ridge after ridge of it, and the tea is the landscape. It is also the south's clearest counter-example to the region's smallholder norm. Where the Nilgiris run on tens of thousands of tiny growers selling green leaf to factories, Munnar is a small number of very large estates that grow, make and sell their own.
What grows here
Black tea from the Kannan Devan hills, mostly CTC with an orthodox minority, sold under company and estate names rather than under the word Munnar. The character sits close to the Nilgiris across the state line: brisk, bright and clean, made for blending as much as for drinking alone. A few gardens make green tea as well, and the cold-season lots are the ones worth chasing, as they are everywhere in the southern hills.
The ground
The High Range is the Western Ghats at their tallest, and Anamudi, at 2,695 m the highest peak in India south of the Himalaya, stands directly over the gardens. The estates run up its shoulders from about 975 m to just under 2,000 m, on steep, well-drained ground. Two things follow from that height. The southwest monsoon arrives with more force here than in almost any other tea district in India, and the December and January nights get cold enough for frost, which does damage in a bad year and concentrates the leaf in a good one.
Harvest seasons
Picking runs year round, as it does throughout the southern hills, so quality moves with the weather rather than with a flush calendar. The monsoon months give bulk. The cool dry weeks around the turn of the year are when the leaf concentrates, by the same mechanism that produces the Nilgiris' frost lots next door.
What to look for
Munnar is a tourism destination before it is a tea name, and much of what is sold in the town is packed for visitors: flavoured blends, 'white tea' of doubtful description and packets with no estate on them. Tea worth buying carries a company or estate name and says whether it is orthodox or CTC. Note also that not every famous high garden above the town is in Kerala. Kolukkumalai, the best known of them, sits over the line in Tamil Nadu and is sold as Munnar because Munnar is the road you reach it by.
How it got here
The Kannan Devan hills were leased to a British planter in the 1870s and planted through the decades that followed, and for most of the twentieth century the estates ran under one company, passing from a British managing agency to Tata. The turn came in 2005, when Tata handed the Munnar plantations to Kanan Devan Hills Plantations, a company majority-owned by its own workers. Employees hold roughly two thirds of the shares, it was the first plantation company in India set up that way and it is the reason the ownership question here has a different answer than anywhere else in the south.
Other places in Kerala
- Idukki
- Wayanad