Country
Iran
Iran drinks a great deal of tea and grows a fraction of it. The crop comes from one strip of the Caspian coast, Gilan and Mazandaran, where the Alborz mountains catch enough rain to make a subtropical climate out of an otherwise dry country. The industry is barely a century old. It was founded by a diplomat who learned the process in British India under a false name, and it has spent most of its life competing with the imports it was created to replace.
What grows here
Black tea, and very little else. Gilan holds the great majority of the plantations, with Lahijan in the east of the province as the name that carries any weight, and Mazandaran holds the rest, around Tonekabon. Small quantities of green tea are made from the same leaf. There are no estates and no garden hierarchy: the crop belongs to tens of thousands of smallholders who sell green leaf to factories, so what reaches a shelf carries a packer's brand rather than a place.
The ground
The Caspian littoral is the wet corner of Iran. Gardens sit on the northern foothills of the Alborz, terraced above the rice paddy of the coastal plain, in a humid subtropical band that gets rain the plateau behind the mountains never sees. The same range that makes the climate also caps it: the usable ground is a coastal ribbon with mountains above it and the sea, the paddy and expanding towns below, so there is nowhere for the crop to grow into. Plots are small and steep and are worked by families rather than by companies.
Harvest seasons
Three pickings a year. The spring crop starts in late April and is the one worth chasing, a second follows in early June and the last begins in late September. Green leaf is bought from growers by the state tea organisation and graded on the way into the factory, so here the difference between an early and a late picking is settled as a payment before it is ever a tasting note. Winter shuts the gardens down completely.
How it is made here
Orthodox black, made light. The method came from India at the outset and has not moved far since, giving a leaf that brews clear and red rather than dark and thick. That matches how the tea is used: brewed strong in a small pot kept hot over a samovar, then cut with water in the glass to the strength the drinker wants. Sweetness goes outside the cup: a lump of sugar or of nabat, the crystallised rock sugar, held in the mouth while the tea passes it, which is a control applied sip by sip rather than glass by glass.
What to look for
The brand is not the origin. Iran imports most of what it drinks, chiefly from India and Sri Lanka, and the same companies pack both, so a Persian name on a box says nothing about where the leaf grew. The words that do the work are Gilan and Lahijan. Expect a light tea as well: Iranian black is thinner and brighter than an Assam, and a buyer judging it against one will call it weak when it is simply built for a different glass.
How it got here
Iran drank tea for centuries before it grew any, buying it overland and later by sea, much of it from India. Cultivation dates from around 1900 and from one man. Mohammad Mirza, later titled Kashef al-Saltaneh, served as Iran's consul general in British India, studied tea cultivation there while passing himself off as a Frenchman because outsiders were not meant to learn it, then brought seed and saplings home. He planted at Lahijan in Gilan and at Tonekabon in Mazandaran, an earlier attempt with Indian seed in the 1880s having failed. He is buried at Lahijan, under what is now the national tea museum.
Places in Iran
Named places inside Iran. The ones with a page of their own are links.