Now that’s berry expensive taste.
A bunch of 24 Ruby Roman grapes sold for $11,000 at a Japanese auction on Tuesday, NHK World Japan News reported. Takashi Hosokawa, who manages a chain of hot spring hotels on the northern cost of Honshu island, was the winning bidder who set the record for the most expensive single bunch of grapes ever sold.
“It is a great honor to be able to be able to own Ruby Romans from Ishikawa prefecture in the first year of Japan’s new era of Reiwa,” Hosokawa told NHK World Japan News. “We are going to treat our customers with these grapes at our hotel.”
This variety is grown and sold exclusively in the Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan, where it was cultivated over the course of 14 years before it entered the market in 2008 at just over $900. The “dream grape,” as described by the Ruby Roman Club, is a bright red that is about the size of a ping-pong ball. They are prized for their juiciness and sweetness, but low acidity.
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Only a select number are sold each year — only about 26,000 will hit the market this year — to keep up the demand, CNN reported.
Exotic and expensive fruit — which can be cultivated to be a different color (like $40 white strawberries) or shape (like $200 square watermelons) than usual — is a popular luxury product in Japan, where pieces are often given as gifts for bosses or other special recipients. And an $11,000 bunch of grapes isn’t even the most expensive of the, well, bunch.
Two Yubari King melons were auctioned for just over $45,000 — that’s more than $22,500 apiece — in May. Why would someone spend the price of a car on a couple of gourds? They reportedly taste very sweet, and farmers dote on the fruit for 100 days or so, such as wearing white gloves and massaging each fruit (known as “ball wiping”) to help coax it into the perfect orb shape.
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A Thai durian — a spiny fruit with a scent so pungent that it’s banned from some public transportation, hotels and planes in certain countries, BBC reports — was auctioned for almost $48,000 in June.
And a single, scoop-shaped Bijin-hime (beautiful princess) strawberry from Okuda Nichio can sell for $4,395 — although it is the size of a tennis ball. And the berries reportedly each take around 45 days to grow.
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