Yana Vinetskaya, exclusively to Vestnik Kavkaza
In 1892 one of researchers of the tea business in Russia, A.P. Subbotin, wrote: “It is proved by long experience that tea causes a peaceful attitude, softens social views. For a worker, tea is the only pleasure and gormandize. In Russia, drinking tea makes views less pessimistic and helps patient Russian people overcome various life obstacles.” Drinking tea is a symbol of Russian culture. It became a part of our life, and it seems tea is our traditional drink, that it has been used for centuries. In fact, the history of the tea business in Russia is much shorter. Tea had to experience many difficulties before becoming a people’s product.
A cradle of drinking tea was Moscow, where tea arrived in the 17th century and from where it slowly began to spread into other towns and villages situated along major roads. However, over the next two centuries drinking tea in Russia wasn’t popular. Tea was a luxury and was consumed only by higher classes. Even middle-ranking nobility couldn’t afford always it. By the middle of the 19th century tea was unavailable to common people, as its price was very high.
The path of tea from plantation to samovar (a Russian tea-urn) was long and difficult: from China to Mongolia, and only then to Russia. In the 19th century the path was more than 4 thousand miles long and took 2-3 months. In the 1840s and 1850s annual tea import was less than 400,000 pounds, but in the 1870s the import surpassed a million of pounds. The next decade tea import doubled in Russia due to development of railroads in Russia, construction of the Suez Canal and establishing of Russian companies in China.
Simultaneously the Russian Empire began to grow tea, and the Caucasus was aimed at playing an important role in the process. First attempts to adapt tea to the climate of the Black Sea shore of Georgia were undertaken in the early 1830s.
Serious encourage to development of tea business in Georgia took place by an accident. During the Crimean war of 1854 a British ship crashed near Poti, and the crew was captured by local soldiers. One of officers from the ship, Jacob McNamara, married a Georgian noble and stayed in Georgia. It was he who had an idea to grow tea in Georgia. First experiments in this direction were undertaken near Ozurgeti. As the result small tea plantations were established near Ozergeti and Chakva. In 1864 first samples of “the Caucasus tea” were demonstrated at one of the trade-industrial exhibitions of Russia. However, the quality was lower than Chinese tea, it was used only as an additive to imported tea.
By the end of the 19th and the early 20th century separate enthusiastic breeders tried to promote tea culture to the north beyond Georgia and to other subtropical territories of the Russian Empire. In 1896 M. Novoselov plated first tea bush in Azerbaijan, in Lenkoran region where by 1900 small selection plantations were founded. Almost the same time other enthusiast, a peasant Koshman, adapted tea bushes in Solokh-Aul in 60 km from Sochi where the current Krasnodar Territory is situated.
However, by 1917 the general square of all tea plantations in Russia has reached 900 hectares, and the produced tea didn’t play a significant role in the market. A turning point took place in the middle 1920s when the state program of tea business development was adopted.
Tea plantations were established not only on the Black Sea coast in Adzharia and Guria, but also in other parts of Georgia: Abkhazia, Imeretia, Mengrelia, and Kakhetia. In the early 1930s the second tea area was founded in the Caucasus – Azerbaijan in Lenkoran and Zakatal regions. In 1937 first tea package was produced in Azerbaijan. The third tea area appeared in the middle 1930s – the Krasnodar Territory. Therefore, the Caucasus became a center of tea business, which provided the country with tea for many decades.
