Georgia (the Country): Europe's Oldest Tea Culture

If you ask a tea drinker to name the European country that grows the most tea, you'll get blank stares. The answer is Georgia — the Caucasian republic between Russia and Turkey, on the eastern shore of the Black Sea. And the country has been at it for 175 years.

**The Tsarist origin.** Tea was first planted in Georgia in the 1840s, when the Russian Empire — desperate to develop a domestic supply and break Chinese dominance — encouraged commercial cultivation in the warm, humid Black Sea coast. Lai Lin Jau, a Chinese tea master, was brought to the western region of Adjara to set up the first commercial gardens. By 1900, Georgia was supplying significant volumes of black tea to the Russian market.

**The Soviet boom.** Under the Soviet Union, Georgian tea production exploded. By the 1980s, Georgia was producing 100 million kilograms of tea per year — making it the largest tea producer in Europe and one of the largest in the world. Almost all of it was consumed inside the USSR.

**The 1991 collapse.** When the Soviet Union dissolved, the centralised tea industry collapsed with it. Plantations went unworked, factories closed, and within a decade Georgian tea production had fallen by 95%. By 2010, the country was producing less than 5 million kilograms a year.

**The 21st-century revival.** Over the last decade, a new generation of Georgian tea makers — many of them returning from abroad with specialty-tea experience — have been reviving abandoned gardens and reintroducing orthodox processing. Estates like Anaseuli, Renegade Tea Estate (founded by an Estonian and a Georgian in 2018), and Manglisi are producing small-batch white, black, and even oolong-style teas to international standards.

**The flavour.** Georgian black tea has a distinctive character — soft, slightly malty, low astringency, with notes of dried fruit and honey. Excellent with or without milk. The whites and oolongs being produced by the new specialty estates show genuine promise; some have won international competitions.

If you've never tried Georgian tea, it's worth seeking out a Renegade or Anaseuli online. You'll be drinking 175 years of history — most of it, until a decade ago, almost lost.