TeaHQ

Derepazarı 7

One of the named Turkish clonal selections, made from the region’s existing seedling stands and named for the district it was found in. It is the best known of a small group of Turkish clones, and its limited adoption is the interesting part: a country can have a functioning selection programme and still plant almost entirely from seed, because replanting is a capital decision rather than a technical one.

Camellia sinensis var. sinensisDerepazarı 7TurkeyAlso called Derepazarı-7

Where it sits in the botany

Derepazarı 7 is recorded under Camellia sinensis var. sinensis, the variety group one level above cultivar. It is associated with Turkey, which is where it was selected or is most widely planted rather than the only place it grows.

Registration code: Derepazarı 7. A breeding or registration code identifies the selection in an institutional register and is often the name a grower uses when the trade name is not.

Also transliterated as: derepazari 7, derepazari-7.

Where it came from

Selected from the seedling stands of the eastern Black Sea coast and named for the district of its origin, within the Turkish tea institute’s clonal selection work.

How firm this is: Inferred rather than taken from a primary breeding or registration record. The naming convention and the selection programme are consistently reported; the selection year and the recorded traits were not verified against a primary source.

What the plant is like

Cold-hardy material selected under the same constraint that shaped the population it came from. Planted in small quantity against a background of seed-grown fields.

Why a grower plants it

Yield, hardiness, when it buds, what it resists and whether a machine can cut it. This is the half of a cultivar’s identity that decides what is actually in the ground, and it is usually left out of writing aimed at drinkers.

Turkey grows tea on the eastern Black Sea coast at the cold-winter margin, on steep smallholdings averaging well under a hectare, and harvests over a short season into a state purchasing system. Every one of those facts works against clonal replanting. A clone's advantages are yield and uniformity, which are realised over the decade after planting; a smallholder with a fraction of a hectare and an assured state purchase price has neither the capital to lose several years of income from that ground nor a market signal rewarding the quality gain. Derepazarı 7 is the best known of a small group of named Turkish clones selected out of the existing seedling stands, and TeaHQ does not name its siblings here because the designations could not be supported to the standard this catalogue requires — the programme is real, the numbers were not confidently recallable, and inventing one would be worse than omitting several.

What it does in the cup

Turkish black tea generally is light-to-moderate in body with a bright coppery colour and a firm but not harsh astringency, brewed very strong in the upper pot of a çaydanlık and diluted at the glass. Clone-level differences are not kept separate through that system and are not something a drinker encounters.

How much of this is really the cultivar?

There is no meaningful cultivar claim to make about Turkish tea in the cup, and the reason is structural rather than botanical: leaf from thousands of smallholdings is pooled at collection, processed centrally and sold as a national product, so no clone's contribution survives to the glass. What Derepazarı 7 is genuinely evidence of is something else, and it is the more interesting finding — a country can run a functioning selection programme for decades and still plant almost entirely from seed, because replanting is a capital decision made by people who cannot afford it rather than a technical one made by agronomists.

Cultivar, growing site and processing all shape a cup, and the cultivar is very often the smallest of the three. It is also the one that fits on a label, so almost every commercial incentive runs toward overstating it. This section is on every cultivar page that has been reviewed for it, including the ones where the honest answer is “less than you would think”.

What it is usually made into

The categories this cultivar is typically processed into. It is a statement about common practice, not a limit — processing decides the category, and a cultivar can be taken down more than one route.

  • Black tea — Tea taken deliberately through full enzymatic oxidation, giving the dark leaf, amber-to-red liquor and malty or brisk character most Western drinkers think of as simply 'tea'.

Teas in the catalogue made from Derepazarı 7

Other cultivars in Camellia sinensis var. sinensis

Sources

  • TeaHQ editorial synthesis — TeaHQ

This page is TeaHQ’s own synthesis throughout. No breeding register or institutional record stands behind the account above, which is why the origin note carries its confidence in the open rather than reading as a citation.

How TeaHQ handles sources