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For the tourists and visitors who will be going to visit the central Japan in a hot spring going to have snack on $460 grapes, or rather, grape. On Tuesday at an auction in Kanazawa, the manager of a chain of hot spring hotels in Ishikawa Prefecture, on the northern coast of the main Honshu island, became the winning bidder for a bunch of Ruby Roman grapes.
Takashi Hosokawa will pay 1.2 million yen, or around $11,000, for the 24 plump, deep red grapes prized for their juiciness, high sugar content and low acidity. It’s the most expensive bunch since the breed came to market 12 years ago, the auctioneers said.
“We offered 1.2 million yen to mark the 12 years and to celebrate Reiwa’s first auction,” Hosokawa told reporters, referring to the country’s new era, which began in May with the coronation of Emperor Naruhito.”We would like to convey to our customers our exhilaration when we held the (box of) grapes.”
It is said that Ruby Red grapes were originated in Ishikawa and first came to market in 2008. From that time, they have been popular and only a select number being sold to keep demand and exclusivity levels high. Around 26,000 will be sold this year, though not all will go for the record prices seen at the Kanazawa auction.
“People purchase these expensive fruits to demonstrate how special their gifts are to the recipients, for special occasions or for someone socially important, like your boss,” Soyeon Shim, dean of the School of Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told CNN in 2017.
The fruit can be come sometime in uniquely shaped or colored fruit, which are painstakingly cultivated or forced to grow in a specific way, such as square watermelons, heart-shaped strawberries or the albino White Jewel strawberries grown in Karatsu, on Japan’s southern Kyushu Island.
“Everyone is surprised when they see a white strawberry,” farmer Yasuhito Teshima told CNN’s Great Big Story.
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