Andro Tavartkiladze (Qartuli Cha)

Andro started his adult life bouncing around a bunch of different jobs in the legal and marketing spheres while building up a family business: a hotel in Ureki, a small seaside resort not far from his childhood village of Nagomari. But tourism is a seasonal business, and he and his wife Lika wanted to raise a family in the fresh air and clean environment of the countryside, so he decided to diversify. His family had worked in the tea fields back in the Soviet days, like just about everyone around Nagomari, and he'd always loved drinking tea himself. So in 2019, Andro started cleaning up some old plantations on family land, and visiting Dato Tenieshvili a few villages over to learn some of the tricks of the trade. By 2021, he was already making his first teas.

Andro's philosophy is to work hard and do everything with the whole heart. He says although he relies on the help of some workers to keep the fields clean and get the tea plucked, there's nothing in the whole process of making tea that he isn't happy to do himself; he prizes good relationships with his team, who after all are his neighbors and childhood acquaintances. Similarly, there's nothing he makes that he isn't happy to drink himself; "Qartuli Cha is for tea lovers, by tea lovers", he says.

Aiming to make the healthiest and best quality tea possible, Andro doesn't use chemical inputs on his fields and plucks leaves entirely by hand. He is currently utilizing four hectares of tea bushes for production, and has another eleven hectares he'd like to get into shape eventually.