Country
Russia
Russia grows tea at Sochi, on a narrow strip of Black Sea coast under the western Caucasus, and it is the northernmost tea grown at any real scale. The latitude is the whole point: the bushes spend months dormant, sometimes under snow, and the crop is tiny. Russia's real weight in tea is on the other side of the trade, as one of the largest consuming and blending markets there is, packing leaf grown by other people.
What grows here
Black tea, in small quantity, from Krasnodar Krai: the plantations around Dagomys, Matsesta, Solokhaul and Adler, all within reach of Sochi. Green tea is made in smaller amounts still. There is no second growing region and no internal hierarchy, so Krasnodar tea is the whole of it. Everything else on a Russian shelf is imported leaf packed domestically, including Russian Caravan, which is a blend recipe rather than a Russian-grown tea.
The ground
A humid subtropical pocket at around forty-four degrees north, which works only because the Caucasus blocks the cold air that would otherwise reach the coast. Rainfall is high, the soils are acidic brown-forest ground and the growing season is short, with a real winter and a long dormancy behind it. Severe cold does kill bushes, so plantings sit on sheltered slopes rather than wherever the land allows. Slow growth over a short season is the local quality claim and it is the argument every dormant-season origin makes.
The bushes
Cold tolerance is the only breeding priority that has ever mattered here. The plantings descend from Chinese sinensis seed and from Georgian stock brought up the coast, selected over generations for what survives a Sochi winter rather than for what tastes best. That is a different selection pressure from the one every other origin applies, and it explains both why the plant material is a mixed seedling population and why nothing is sold by cultivar name.
Harvest seasons
May to September or October, then nothing at all. A short season, low yields and a small planted area together keep Russian tea a domestic curiosity: the country drinks vastly more than it could ever grow.
What to look for
The one thing to check is whether it is Russian at all. Packets sold as Krasnodar tea have long contained mostly imported leaf with a token local fraction, because the genuine crop cannot fill the demand its own name creates. Buy from a named estate. And do not read Russian Caravan as an origin: it is a smoky blend named after an overland trade route, and the leaf in it comes from China, India or wherever the blender bought it.
How it got here
Nineteenth-century attempts to grow tea on this coast failed until Iuda Koshman planted a plot at Solokhaul above Sochi in 1901, with seed carried up from Adjara in Georgia, and got the bushes through the winters. That is the founding event Russian tea still dates itself from. The Soviet state built the industry out from there and Krasnodar tea became a domestic premium name alongside the far larger Georgian supply. The sector shrank badly after 1991, and part of the planted area has since been lost to abandonment and to Sochi's development, with a partial revival running against that.