Georgia’s tea industry collapsed alongside the Soviet Union but is now reaching a luxury market
Rainclouds shroud the Caucasus mountains as the day’s harvest begins on a rural estate in western Georgia. A tea picker moves quickly between bushes with confidence, her hands plucking only the greenest, most recent growth on each plant.
When Pati began picking tea leaves as a teenager this was a collective farm in the Soviet Union – following its collapse it was abandoned and the bushes swallowed by the surrounding forest until new growers began cutting them free in the 2010s.
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