Jean-Marc Sanchez, in his greenhouses at Acapella Plantations, Saint Cyprien (December 2022)
In the landscape of French tea gardens, Acapella presents a unique face with its immense greenhouse. A bold choice to produce on a large scale and develop a profitable project based solely on high-quality organic tea production, without any ancillary activities. A somewhat audacious venture that fulfils the vision of Jean-Marc Sanchez, its founder, who aims, as he explains, to extract “a raw product without embellishments, without trumpets, without drums, and its true melody: Acappella.”
Jean-Marc is an agronomic engineer who hails from a family of vineyard owners on his father’s side, with roots in the Catalan land, where he has established his plantation just four kilometers from the sea. A land of abundance, blessed with exceptional sunshine between the Mediterranean and the Pyrenees mountains, in a region of southern France renowned for its orchards and sun-drenched wines.
Coming from the viticulture world, Jean-Marc later transitioned to the coffee industry. He is a roaster and the owner of a boutique and two coffee shops in the Toulouse region. A traveler at heart, he enjoys sourcing products directly and has explored coffee and tea plantations worldwide. The pandemic put a halt to his desire to travel, but not to his wish to be close to cultivation. How could he continue without travelling the world? Tea grows in France, but not yet in Roussillon. Could this terroir be suitable? The idea was born, and just a few months later, the plantation was launched.
Let’s follow him step by step on this journey as a French tea planter…
Laying the foundations
Growing tea plants in this Occitan region is a first. Like all pioneers in various French terroirs, Jean-Marc Sanchez has no regional experience to rely on. His project is designed to be ecological, utilizing organic, energy-efficient, and resilient materials. To bring it to life, he analyses all factors that could impact the future plantation: wind, photoperiod, sunshine duration, humidity…
The first factor is wind. The Tramontane, a cold and dry regional wind blowing from the Pyrenees, can dry out the tea plants; however, marine winds from the Mediterranean bring sea spray, which is an advantage. Then comes the sun. In this Mediterranean climate, the sun can be scorching, and heat waves are common. However, this exceptional sunshine allows for an extended harvesting period and, combined with the sea’s proximity, ensures mild, frost-free winters. Lastly, a significant challenge associated with this sunshine is the frequent occurrence of droughts. To counter these difficulties, Jean-Marc Sanchez devised a solution common in market gardening and horticulture, but never previously used in France for tea cultivation: establishing his plantation under a photovoltaic greenhouse.
An ingenious and ecological solution
The greenhouse acts as a protective cocoon for the tea plants. It blocks desiccating winds and provides shade while converting intense sunlight into energy through solar panels, ensuring energy self-sufficiency. Roof vents allow excess heat to escape and let in the cool night air. This structure also helps maintain humidity with the use of mulch and a drip irrigation system. Another major advantage of this enclosed environment for pesticide-free organic farming is the ability to introduce beneficial insects to protect the tea plants from pests without their dispersal into the wild.
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A viable economic model?
Jean-Marc Sanchez has chosen a farming model for this unique project in France. He aims to prove that it is possible to produce high-quality tea and make a living from it without side activities. By assessing operational costs, he realizes that the only way to ensure the project’s viability is to achieve economies of scale by increasing the cultivated area and the number of tea plants. Fixed costs, particularly wages, are very high in France, and he must also recoup significant investments in greenhouse facilities and processing equipment. Without this optimization, the retail price of the tea would be far too high to secure enough market outlets to make a living from the tea garden.
The Acapella Plantations
In 2020, Jean-Marc Sanchez launched his tea plantation under a four-hectare photovoltaic greenhouse. The land, formerly used for vegetable farming, features sandy-loam soil with good drainage and a neutral pH. The proximity to other farms fosters an environment conducive to exchange, making it easier to find seasonal workers.
He sourced tea plants from nurseries in France, the Netherlands, and Germany. In 2021, 8,000 tea plants from 19 cultivars were planted. Genetic diversity is crucial for this organic plantation, where pest control methods are limited. Some cultivars are not precisely identified, but this heterogeneity allows for selecting varieties best suited to this new terroir. This long-term research is being conducted with the Purpan Agricultural School in Toulouse, where Jean-Marc studied. The soil is enriched with compost, mushroom compost, a blend of manure and droppings, and green waste. Mulching helps to limit weeding and retain moisture.
With 12,000 tea bushes planted the following year, and a further 15,000 in 2024, the planted area now covers 2.5 hectares. In 2024, these 30,000 tea bushes produced almost 200 kilos of tea in 15 harvests from April to November. Jean-Marc Sanchez hopes to double this yield in 2025 and eventually produce 1 to 2 tonnes from the 4 hectares of the greenhouse. A greenhouse where crickets and batrachians sing, and where a whole host of wildlife has made its home!
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Challenges and adaptation: Learning the Trade
“The first lesson of agriculture is humility: you do what you can with what you have,” says Sanchez. The learning curve has been steep, sometimes with serious consequences, such as the loss of thousands of plants due to the absence of permitted biological remedies against a pest that usually attacks tomato plants. The greenhouse is now equipped with traps to monitor butterfly populations that could lay eggs on the tea plants, enabling preventive action when a critical threshold is reached.
Weeds also thrive in the greenhouse’s warm, humid environment. Herbicides are not an option, and manual weeding is laborious on such a scale. Jean-Marc considered using ducks, but instead planted his tea plants in a layout that allows a tractor with a mower to pass between rows.
For a plantation the size of Acapella, harvesting is another crucial issue. The first hand-picked harvests discouraged him from continuing in this direction due to several challenges: the difficulty of finding pluckers on very short notice (the leaves are growing!), the impossibility of properly training them on the same morning, and the fact that workers do not always speak French. As a result, the harvest was of poor quality, requiring lengthy and tedious sorting before processing could begin — often in the middle of the night. Not to mention the very high labor costs. Jean-Marc has therefore opted for mechanization, drawing inspiration from practices in Japan. A hedge trimmer imported from China has been fitted to a tractor, allowing it to precisely trim the young shoots, which are then suctioned into a large bag. This system enables the harvest to be carried out by just two people: him and his crop manager. The plucking tables are pruned and prepared at the end of winter.
Tea processing
From the onset, Jean-Marc decided to make a wok green tea, using the Chinese method, and a black tea, to which was added a white tea, the simplest to make. Processing takes place immediately after harvest in a small cottage built into the greenhouse. During his travels to tea-producing countries, he was able to observe how this operation was carried out; however, processing tea grown on new soil is an entirely different matter! So, he researched online, gathering information from various sources, and sent one of his cultivation supervisors to train with Denis Mazerolle, who had preceded him in this experiment and now offers training courses. He looked to Japan and China to draw inspiration without trying to copy. And he set about his work as a craftsman, listening to the leaves that were to become the first tea from Roussillon, looking at them, touching them, smelling them… The resulting white tea, green tea, and black tea each have their own distinctive characters and share a common spirit. These teas have an astonishing sweetness that Jean-Marc explains is partly due to the terroir, but also to the greenhouse, the cocoon that protects his tea bushes from the stress they would experience in the open air. And, of course, the processing method, which serves as a revelation. Recognizable teas that will evolve over the years.
Assessment methods
Jean-Marc, like his fellow growers, wanted an outside view of his teas and had them tasted by tea professionals. To get a complete picture, he also turned to the Purpan School of Agriculture, where two types of sensory analysis were carried out. The first, which is subjective, involves using a panel of tasters made up of teachers and technicians from the school, both novices and connoisseurs, whose task is to compare these teas with different types of tea normally found on the market. To this end, they receive 20 hours of olfactory and gustatory training over a period of several months, at the end of which they carry out a sensory evaluation during a tasting session. The second method of analysis, this time objective, is a physico-chemical analysis carried out in a laboratory using a device that measures the volatile compounds in the teas.
Tasting Notes
Now let’s taste these Roussillon teas and follow the plantation’s instructions!
Let’s start with the spring white tea, with its large grey-green leaves tinged with brown and a woody, chocolaty nose with a vegetal background. The golden-yellow liquor offers a lingering taste, a beautiful complexity of gourmand, woody and chocolate notes with hints of dried fruit on a background of cooked autumn fruit.
Then the green tea, with its beautiful twisted leaves and cooked and marine aromas with a hint of butter, producing a light yellow-green liquor with a fine astringency. The aromas develop into a complexity of fresh, cooked vegetal, marine and buttery notes enriched with minerality, zesty peaks and hints of white flowers.
Finally, the black tea with large, twisted leaves and a very rich nose that evokes wood, malt, honey, and spices, as does its long finish on the palate, coppery liquor.
1st prize for hot drinks at the Gourmet Selection show (Paris) in 2023, special prize in Japan at the World Green Tea Contest for green tea, silver medal for black tea at the Tea Expo in Shanghai, gourmet medal at the AVPA contest (Paris) in 2024… the awards received in international competitions bear witness to the fact that, under the leadership of Jean-Marc Sanchez, Roussillon is a young tea-growing region to be reckoned with from now on! Marketed on the Acapella plantations website, as well as in Jean-Marc Sanchez’s boutiques and coffee shops, Roussillon teas have also been noticed and adopted by Michelin-starred chefs and French tea houses. They also act as ambassadors for the region at various tourist sites. All they’re waiting for now is to conquer the world’s tea lovers and professionals!
Awards include:
- The Silver Award in 2024 at the Shanghai International Tea Expo
- A special prize in Japan from the World Green Tea Contest 2023
- Named a Gourmet Sélection in 2023
- The AVPA Gourmet Medal in 2024
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Congratulations on winning so many awards for high-quality tea. This is a fascinating story. It must have taken a huge amount of investment in time and money.