Teatime in Tbilisi: Georgia’s Soviet-era plantations brew up a renaissance

Georgia’s tea industry collapsed alongside the Soviet Union but is now reaching a luxury market Rainclouds shroud the Caucasus mountains as the day’s harvest begins on a rural estate in western Georgia. A tea picker moves quickly between bushes with confidence, her hands plucking only the greenest, most recent growth on each plant. When Pati began picking tea leaves as a teenager this was a collective farm in the Soviet Union – following its collapse it was abandoned and the bushes swallowed by the surrounding forest until new growers began cutting them free in the 2010s. Today those leaves are in high demand as luxury tea importers across Europe and the US discover what the Soviets already knew: Georgia’s humid Black Sea air and cold Caucasus winters make it an ideal location to grow tea, but now with a focus on quality above Soviet-era volume. “These plants are obviously very happy where they are because it just tastes incredible,” said Ana Dane of the New York-based In Pursuit of Tea, the supplier to Michelin three-star restaurant Eleven Madison Park. “They were just exquisitely-produced teas,” she said, describing her first taste of teas from Renegade Tea Estate