Tea tasting near Modesto? This magical California farm offers private tours
Among my favorite parts of the Central Valley are the lesser-known pockets of beauty it holds.
A colleague, Maria Figueroa, and I got to visit one of those magical places on March 25, in Stockton. At least, the address says Stockton. It felt like a picturesque Italian countryside.
Redwood Tea Estate is the only large-scale, commercial tea farm in California and one of fewer than 10 that operate on an acre or more in the U.S., said owner Patrick Sunbury. He began growing camellia sinensis (tea plants) in 2020 and opened his farm to the public for tours and tastings around a year ago.
Commercial tea farms in the U.S. are limited for three reasons, Sunbury said: cost, climate and knowledge.
“People don’t know how to prep the land, people don’t know how to care for the plant, people don’t know how to process the plant,” he said. “That’s what’s preventing more people from being a commercial farmer.”
While “boutique” growers with a couple of hundred plants do exist, Sunbury has 2,500 plants on his half-acre Stockton farm and an additional 16,000 on 3.3 acres in Lodi. Another farm in California that produces tea for retail, Golden Feather Tea in Concow, operates on a smaller scale, with 200 plants.
Eye disease causes landscape architect to become farmer
Sunbury grew up in a suburban part of Bakersfield and remembers visiting his grandmother’s house in Stockton, where he now lives and grows tea plants. He and his cousins would play in what’s now the tea field, but back then was just dirt.
In 2019, while working as a landscape architect in Southern California, Sunbury developed trigeminal neuralgia, an eye disease. He no longer could work on a computer for long hours.
Sunbury’s grandmother had recently died, and her house in Stockton was empty.
“My dad offered, if I wanted to come here and move here, that there was a half acre of empty dirt in the backyard that I could try to grow something on to support myself,” Sunbury said. “We brainstormed different crops to grow and we decided upon tea because we would be the first commercial tea farm in California — if we were to be able to make it successful.”
He used his expertise as a landscape architect to design his tea farm. Sunbury said that as his eyes started healing, he began being able to work on the computer again for shorter periods of time.
“I still actually do some landscape design and construction today,” he said. “I have a separate Patrick Sunbury Design website, and I still do design builds. I’m a licensed contractor, too.”
How to book a tour and tasting at Redwood Tea Estate
During tours, Sunbury guides visitors through the tea field and garden while explaining how it is cultivated. Depending on the season, guests may pick fruits or herbs from the garden to sample with the tea.
Sunbury then ushers his guests to a long wooden table he built in a garden area to sample his offerings.
All tours are private to the groups that book them. They are by appointment only and can be booked up to 70 days in advance.
The price is $150 for two hours and up to four people. Each additional person is $30, up to 12 people total.
For $450, Sunbury offers a four-hour tour, which is described on the booking website, redwoodteaestate.com, as a “half-day masterclass for the true enthusiast and nature lover.” The package accommodates eight people, with a $45 charge per additional person up to 12, and includes a catered lunch.
Sunbury said tea lovers have been enthusiastic about the tours, with people traveling from other parts of the country, and even internationally, to visit his farm.
“We only started opening it up to the public maybe a year ago,” he said. “I had the website up to sell (the tea), and then I kept getting emails. Somebody would say, ‘I want to visit your farm.’”
His tea sells out quickly, both because of the demand for high-quality products and because of the small craft batches that are harvested. He sells at select events like the Terra Madre Americas festival in Sacramento and the San Francisco International Tea Festival, but the majority of his sales are online through his monthly tea subscription.
For $29 per month — a more palatable payment method for the $87 value of the quarterly membership — Sunbury sends out four, one-ounce compostable pouches of loose-leaf tea every three months. The boxes are customizable (ex: ”surprise me” box, herbal-only, green and white only).
Also included in the membership is a stainless-steel infuser welcome gift, an invitation to an annual tasting event held Mother’s Day weekend, a year-end gift of a stainless-steel caddy filled with 1.5 ounces of an exclusive reserve tea in place of one of the standard pouches, and special pricing on additional teas for gifting during the holidays.
Premium teas made at Redwood Tea Estate
Sunbury is meticulous about explaining his process from planting to harvest.
He grows the bushes to the height of his bellybutton and then prunes them to create what is called a “plucking table” so he can hand-harvest collections of two leaves and a bud.
Larger companies harvest plants by machine, which often gathers old leaves and stems that get chopped finely and put into tea bags.
Sunbury picks only the new growth, or “flush,” at the top of the plant, leaving intact the two leaves and a bud. This loose-leaf tea can be steeped three to five times and still retains its flavor.
Harvest begins in April and continues through mid-October. Sunbury uses no pesticides, fungicides or herbicides, instead relying on his knowledge of the botanical ecosystems that he built to keep pests and weeds away.
He said tea is made from one of two plants: camellia sinensis or camellia assamica. Camellia assamica is grown in Nepal, India, Sri Lanka and Africa and is used almost exclusively to make bold back teas. Camellia sinensis — which he uses — makes more delicate teas and is grown in Japan, Korea, China and Vietnam. The type of tea the plant becomes depends on how it is processed.
Sunbury makes green, white, oolong and black teas. He has a commercial kitchen in Roseville where he processes and packages his products.
White tea requires the least amount of processing, Sunbury said. All that is required is for it to dry.
“(Black tea) is the most amount of steps,” he said. “The most complicated would be oolong because you’re playing with a range of oxidation, so it’s hard to get everything to be the same each time.”
Sunbury grows various citrus trees and fragrant flowers for use in special tea blends.
A limited blend that may or may not return, mandarin noir, was sold as black tea leaved and buds stuffed inside a hollowed, dried mandarin. It is meant to be steeped in its entirety.
He has used orange blossoms for another blend, layering them over tea leaves in the sun to seep their essence into the leaves, repeating the process until he gets the flavor just right.
This story was originally published April 10, 2026 at 10:37 AM.
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