Wayanad
A Kerala plateau district growing tea alongside coffee and spice, at lower elevation than Munnar and giving a fuller, softer cup.
Elevation
Recorded at 700–1300 metres.
How firm this is: Inferred from general knowledge of the district rather than measured or taken from a source that states it.
When it is picked
Year-round plucking under a heavy south-west monsoon, with the drier months after the rains giving the better leaf. Wayanad sits lower than the high Kerala and Tamil Nadu plateaux, so it is warmer and its tea is correspondingly fuller and less aromatic.
How firm this is: Inferred from general knowledge of the district rather than measured or taken from a source that states it.
How production is organised
A mix of estates and a strong smallholder presence, in a district where tea shares the ground with coffee, pepper and cardamom on the same farms. A grower here is often not a tea grower but a farmer with some tea, which shapes how much attention the crop gets.
How firm this is: Inferred from general knowledge of the district rather than measured or taken from a source that states it.
How the name is written
Also transliterated as wayanad. Romanisations of a district name vary by system and by vendor, and a packet spelling one way is not describing a different place.
Other teas recorded from here
Other growing regions in India
The neighbouring districts are the useful comparison: they share a country, a grading convention and often a cultivar, so what differs between them is closer to terroir than anything a cross-border comparison can isolate.
Sources
- TeaHQ editorial synthesis — TeaHQ
This page is TeaHQ’s own synthesis throughout. No external document stands behind the elevation band, the climate note or the character described above, which is why each carries its confidence in the open.
Written comparisons
Where TeaHQ has set this region against something it is routinely confused with, and argued the differences out in full.
- Nilgiri vs Munnar vs Anamalai vs Wayanad — South India grows a great deal of tea and almost none of it reaches drinkers under a district name. These four sit across the Western Ghats at different elevations, and elevation is the variable that separates them in the cup as it does in Sri Lanka.