This is not the sort of flowing report one would wish to offer, especially inasmuch as the former Soviet Union was once a major tea producer with a fascinating history and interesting neighbors.  Russian tea may well be extinct, and with it dies a tradition.  What follows may be read purely as requiem, for the principal tea districts were irradiated in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster even before recent wars enveloped the Caucasus districts where Russian tea once grew.  How much remains today is anybody’s guess.  Russia’s first (China) tea plants were set out in 1848 in the Republic of Georgia, where the largest and best-known tea estate in the former USSR, Chakve, was established as a Crown Property in 1892.  Over the following decades Russia planted over two hundred thousand acres of tea, mainly on slopes overlooking the Black Sea where snow is not uncommon.  This is - or was - the world’s northernmost tea district and the only one to produce both tea and wine.  Beautifully black and well-twisted, Russian Orthodox leaf yielded a somewhat light-colored, thin-bodied infusion that always tended to taste flat, honestly speaking.  Today Azerbaijan shows signs of recovery from a 1995 low of twelve hundred tons - down from almost forty thousand tons in 1988 - but tea production throughout Russia, Armenia and Georgia has almost ceased.

The future of the Caucasus as a tea-growing region today rests with Iran, to the East, and Turkey, to the West.  Iran does not export the black tea that it has grown since 1900 near the Caspian shore.  It must be a vast relief to Iran, which has been a tea-using society at least since the Mongol conquest of the 1200s, to be semi-self-sufficient at last.  To the west of Iran, a nation of Turkish coffee lovers was transformed into tea drinkers when Ataturk, the national savior, ordained the planting and local production of tea in 1928.  This tea, obtained from neighboring Georgia, some of it the offspring of the small-leaf China plant set out eighty years earlier, was planted just south of the Georgia border around the town of Rize, where it flourishes mightily.

Today Caykur, Turkey’s government tea monopoly, maintains forty-five tea plantations totalling over two hundred thousand acres with an annual production of over 250 million pounds of tea.  By my calculations, this is more tea per Turk than even the Irish drink per capita, and the Irish are Europe’s leading tea consumers.  The Turks tax imports remorselessly and export as little as possible.  As a result, only in Turkey (besides Japan) does tea-growing mean something other than poverty for the tea growers.  Turkish cay is a distinctly different black tea, light-colored and a little weedy.  But try it at the Topkapi teahouse overlooking Seraglio Point with Istanbul’s Golden Horn and the Bosporus beyond and you will agree that Turkish tea is one of the world’s greatest.

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