Pip, pip, hooray: Hotel chef buys single bunch of 26 grapes for $8,200

A bunch of Japanese grapes has sold for a record one million yen ($8,200), or $315 per berry – no trifling matter even in a country where fruit can cost a small fortune. The record-setting bunch of 26 Ruby Roman grapes was the highest-priced at this year’s first auction in Kanazawa, 180 miles north-west of Tokyo, smashing the previous record of 550,000 yen set last year. Each berry weighs at least 20 grams (three-quarters of an ounce) and is the size of a ping-pong ball. Winning bidder Masayuki Hirai, head chef of the Nikko hotel in Kanazawa, said he was under strict orders, with local tourism bosses eager to capitalise on a new train line to the area.

With the opening of the Hokuriku shinkansen (bullet train) line, I was told to win the bidding at any cost

Winning bidder Masayuki Hirai

Japanese often give top-notch fruits such as melons as gifts, and virgin batches often sell for extraordinary prices, making national headlines and creating a lucrative market for fruit boutiques to flourish despite Japan’s sluggish economy. Earlier this year, a pair of Yubari melons from Hokkaido, northern Japan – considered a status symbol – were snapped up for a jaw-dropping 1.5 million yen ($12,300). Meanwhile, a Japanese department store thought nothing of shelling out 300,000 yen ($2,450) for a pair of pristine mangos grown in southern Japan.

Odd News grapes