Food & Wine

As you can see things are often handled pragmatically in Georgia. Not only do left and right hand drive cars happily share the roads but also things like making a license plate fit are quickly done!

Exiting the city north and driving few kilometers uphill into the mountains, beside the river Rioni, which is also dammed here.

After just 20 minutes we arrive in the small town of Gumati at the end of a steep, small street. There we find one of three Renegade tea sites and the production building. The view is beautiful here in the mountains. At the side behind protective barbwire, we can already see the fist tea bushes (hooray!).

Our guide opened the gate for us, so that we did not have to take these wooden steps (we had my 7-month-old baby boy with us).

However, these guys had to stay outside of the plantation

Generally, the plucking period is over now, so there are no plucking workers (currently only older women from the nearest villages) around and we were all alone with the bushes. When we arrived with the taxi, we just saw the all-season workers that clean the fields leaving and disappearing further down the hill.

You can clearly see the bushes are not evenly distributed and not very densely! It is a Chinese variant of the tea plant that was brought to Georgia in the Soviet era. All is very natural, trees provide just enough shade (not too much!) and a lot of other plants and vegetation is growing on the ground. I know pictures from the highly productive and ‘industrial’ gardens in India. This is nothing like it and it felt all very familial, almost like a supersized private garden. Did you know: every tea variant comes from the same plant and the same leaf material (green, oolong and black), it’s only a matter of production process / treatment.

This is what it’s all about. The top two youngest leaves plus sprout. Each and every one hand plucked. No machines that would also pluck twigs and lower, older leaves that would diminish the quality of the tea and extend the time required to re-grow. Here, the goal is to produce top quality only!

For proper production planning, knowing the climatic conditions is important, as tea plucked at different weather will taste completely different after an identical production process! So this measurement station is essential!

I was surprised to see the fruit of the tea bush for the first time. This is of no use in tea production and it is even a bit detrimental, as producing too much fruits takes away the power of the plant and energy that transfers to taste / intensity of the leaves.

We end the ‘field study’ with a wide-angle picture showing some still abandoned bushes that could be claimed again for production as part of an extension later, and a b/w picture showing the tea garden wilderness with bushes, grass and trees. Really a great experience to see where the leaves grow that I am about to brew / drink.

Heading to the second part of the tour, just a few meters uphill into the manufacturing building already depicted above. First things first, we put on shoe covers to keep the factory clean. Notice the hygiene instructions in English and Georgian (again feel free to google about the unique language, script and alphabet that survived hundreds of years of occupation and / or ‘protection’ by ancient islamic nations and Russia / Soviet Union).

All starts in this room with many different sieves where the incoming plucked leaves do also wither for a specific amount of time.