Coffee, and wine. Besides appearing on the most wanted beverages list of many movers and shakers, what else do they have in common? Wines can run up to $23,929 per bottle, the price of a 1979 Montrachet Domaine de la Romanée-Conti sold at auction in 2001. But jug, or as the Europeans call them, table, wines, with their high alcohol content and low–in some cases less than $5.00 for two liters–price tags are popular with college students–or anyone wanting only to get drunk.
Jug wine is not, like fine aged wine, marketed for its subtle aromas and flavors, as is not savored lovingly on the consumer’s taste buds.
And so it is with coffee. Like wines painstakingly harvested from grapes in specific vineyards, chosen for their unique characteristics and the growing conditions to which they were exposed, the world’s rarest and most expensive coffee are brewed from beans produced in very low quantity by farmers more interested in very high quality.
The most expensive coffees in the world–not based on the price per cup, because that is determined by the establishments in which they are served–are priced per pound of beans. In that they differ from wine; one could not procure a pound of the same grapes which produced the 1978 Montrachet.
So, if you be a coffee connoisseur, who does not recognize the Premium Roast Coffee offered by America’s premier fast-food establishment as anything other than the caffeine-rush-producing equivalent of jug wine, treat yourself to the world’s most expensive, to date, coffee beans.
2006 Hacienda la Esmerelda Geisha beans from Panama, they will set you back over $100 per pound.
They are produced from coffee plants grown on Panamanian hillsides beneath the shade of old guava trees, and when auctioned in May 2006, their wholesale price, at $50.25, topped that of their 2005 version by over $30.
Coffee barista Chris Tacy described coffee produced from the 2005 bean as “Moscato d’Asti candy with rose water and a chocolate/berry stir stick. Bergamot, clemantine, tangerine syrup, pollen craziness.”
Given that, the 2006 version might just put 1978 Montrachet Domaine de la Romanée-Conti to shame.
