Georgia vs Turkey as tea origins
Two Black Sea tea industries with opposite twentieth-century histories. Turkey’s was built up and has run continuously; Georgia’s was one of the Soviet Union’s largest and collapsed almost entirely in the 1990s, and what exists now is a reconstruction.
origin
What is being compared
Point by point
| Aspect | Georgia | Turkey |
|---|---|---|
| When planting began | The 1890s, at Chakvi in Adjara, under the direction of a Chinese specialist brought in for the purpose. | The twentieth century. |
| Twentieth-century trajectory | Enormous Soviet-era expansion, then collapse in the 1990s. | Steady growth into a large continuous domestic industry. |
| Current state | A revival: plantations reclaimed from twenty years of scrub, factories and skills rebuilt. | Mature and stable. |
| Product | Black and green tea, with a growing speciality sector. | Black tea at volume for domestic use. |
| Export orientation | Deliberately export-facing, because the domestic market is small. | Almost none. |
| What a buyer can find | Small named lots from named producers. | Bulk Turkish black tea, rarely by producer. |
The short answer
Georgia is the more interesting country to buy from and the less reliable one to buy from, which is what a reconstruction looks like at this stage. Turkey makes a great deal of competent tea that almost nobody outside the country will ever taste, and that asymmetry is about markets rather than about the leaf.
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