$2600

Probably the most intriguing product that Knipschildt Chocolatier sells is its famed $250 dark chocolate truffle with a French black truffle inside. It is made of 70% Valrhona cacao that is fused into a creamy ganache with truffle oil. The truffle is hand rolled with a dark truffle on the inside and then dusted with cocoa powder. Mmm…is your mouth watering yet? These specialties are only available by preorder, so hurry and call, fax, or email in your order if you want to enjoy these bites of bliss soon.

If you’re not so keen on spending approximately $2,600 for a pound of these babies, then maybe you’d like to consider something more affordable. Knipschildt has a wide selection of individual chocolates of all shapes, flavors, and sizes which can be purchased for $60 per pound.

The individual chocolates have names like Amanda, Helena, and Carrie, suggesting Knipschildt may have a thing for naming his creations after ex-girlfriends. Regardless, each of these intricately formulated pieces is a matchless and pleasurable delicacy.

Knipschildt pairs delicate fruit flavors with exotic spices and fragrances in his chocolates. The Charlotte features apricot and basil ganache, the Elizabeth is composed of a passion fruit and ginger ganache topped with crystallized ginger, and the Kelly contains strawberry and lemon-thyme ganache.

Other odd and surprisingly tasty creations are the Patricia, a narrow, cone-shaped ancho chile and tangerine ganache piece; the Hannah, containing burnt caramel and Hawaiian sea salt; and the Antoinette, filled with rosewater and dark chocolate ganache.

Assuming Knipschildt did name these masterpieces after ex-girlfriends, perhaps the chocolates’ ingredients represent each woman’s personality. If so, the breakup was probably much rougher with Patricia than it was with Antoinette. Just a speculation.

Currently, Knipschildt Chocolatier supplies approximately 900 vendors worldwide, including Whole Foods Market, Dean & DeLuca, The Chocolate Room, and other small specialty stores.

In 2005, Knipschildt expanded his sweet success by opening Chocopologie, a cafe and retail store that offers guests an inside look at how these handmade treats are made the old-fashioned way. While wandering through the establishment, visitors can view different processes that go on in the exciting world of chocolate.

The first window features the packaging team packing the chocolates in handmade boxes and sending them on their way. The following four windows showcase every step the chocolate goes through as it is prepared. These steps involve composing the ganache fillings, tempering the raw chocolate, and cleaning the individual molds.

$330,000

One of the biggest truffles found in decades has fetched $330,000 (£165,000) at an auction held simultaneously in Macau, London and Florence.
A Macau casino owner, Stanley Ho, made the record-breaking bid for the white truffle, which weighed 1.5kg (3.3lb).
Luciano Savini and his son found the highly-prized fungus after it was dug up by his truffle dog near Pisa, northern Italy, last week.
He said he was overwhelmed by the high price paid for his discovery.
He said: “I thought we were going to beat the record, but not to really get to this amount.
“The biggest truffle of the century and the most expensive truffle of the century. There are no more words to say – it is all very beautiful.”
Mr Ho outbid British artist Damien Hirst and Sheikh Mansour Bin Zayed of Abu Dhabi to the prize, according to the South China Morning Post.
All proceeds from the auction were donated to charities.

Wild truffles are harvested all over the world, from the western United States to China, but France and Italy, where they grow in open meadows and dense forests, respectively, are the best-known sources. These highly coveted fungi germinate 10 to 35 inches underground on the roots of any of a dozen varieties of trees. When uncovered, they look like balls of soil and range in size from a pea to a potato.

The global market for this sought-after specialty food is more than $2 billion, Lima estimates. Global gourmands, especially those in New York City, the largest consumer of truffles after Italy, pay through the nose for the delicacies thanks to their earthy, rich, mushroomy essence.

Each of the four commercially available truffles has a distinct growing season and is only available fresh at that time. White truffles (which have never been successfully domesticated) are in season between late September and December. Black winter truffles are available from November through February. Black summer truffles, the most bountiful kind, are in season between June and October. Bianchetti, or Tuscan truffles, are in season from January through April.

To cook a white truffle is to commit a culinary crime: Heat spoils the pungent taste. White truffles are generally shaved thinly over the top of a simple pasta dish to preserve their intoxicating scent. Black truffles (with a subtler smell and a texture that lends itself to cooking) and black summer truffles (known for their nutty flavor) can be shaved and eaten raw or cooked. Tuscan truffles are almost always cooked because heat doesn’t diminish their pronounced flavor.

The most expensive caviar in the world is not the black one, but the almas caviar! The word “almas” is Iranian for diamond. Almas caviar comes from Iran making it extremely rare and extremely expensive. The only known outlet is the Caviar House & Prunier in London England’s Picadilly that sells a kilo of the expensive Almas caviar in a 24-karat gold tin for £16,000, or about $25,000. Coincidentally, it is also where you can find the most expensive meal in Britain. The Caviar House also sells a £800 tin for those on a smaller budget. Beluga caviar comes from a fish over 100 years old, that is virtually unchanged for 120 million years. The luxurious caviar comes from the oldest survivor of the Dinosaur era. Beluga caviar ranges in price from more than $5,000 per kilogram in the United States. Beluga caviar is composed of pea-sized, gray eggs. In general, the lighter the color, the more expensive it is. The grades are: 0 (darkest color), 00 (medium toned), and 000 (lightest color). The 000 grade is the most expensive and is sometimes referred to as “royal caviar”. In terms of texture, royal caviar is often described as rich and silky.

The beluga is a large predator which feeds on other fish. Beluga sturgeons are fish, and are unrelated to the (mammalian) beluga whale. As do many sturgeons, the beluga travels upstream in rivers to spawn. Accordingly, sturgeons are sometimes likened to sea fish; however most scientists consider them to be river fish.
Unconfirmed reports suggest that belugas may reach a length of up to 8.6 m (28 ft) and weigh as much as 2,700 kilograms (5,940 lbs), making them the largest freshwater fish in the world, larger even than the Mekong giant catfish or the pirarucu. At this mass, the beluga would be even heavier than the ocean sunfish, generally recognized as the largest of bony fishes. But the largest generally accepted record is of the female taken in 1827 in the Volga estuary at 1,476 kg (3,249 lbs) and 7.2 m (24 ft).[2] Nevertheless, some scientists still consider the Mekong giant catfish to be the largest freshwater fish, owing to sturgeons’ ability to survive in seawater. Beluga of such great sizes are always very old (continuing to grow throughout life) and have become increasingly rare in recent decades due to the heavy fishing of this species. Today, Belugas that are caught are generally 142-328 cm (4.7-10.9 feet) long and weigh 19-264 kg (42-582 lbs). The female beluga is typically 20% larger than the male.

When an enterprising young man named James Christie opened his sales rooms in London in December 1766, his first auction consisted of the estate of a “deceased nobleman” containing “a large Quantity of Madeira and high Flavour’d Claret.” The records don’t relate how much these delightfully described “high Flavour’d clarets” fetched but as the whole sale realized a grand total £175, it is a sure bet that if Christie had known that two hundred years later, in 1985, his now famous auction house would sell one bottle of wine for £105,000, or $160,000, he might have held back a bottle or two to enrich his future heirs.

This bottle was a Bordeaux, a 1787 Chateau Lafite, and, according to The Guinness Book of World Records, 18 years later it still is the world’s most expensive bottle of wine. Its great age alone would have ensured a good price but what gave it its special cachet, especially to American collectors, and ensured the record price tag were the initials Th.J. etched in the glass.

The bottle had belonged to Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States and one of the most revered of its founding fathers. A philosopher, scientist and statesmen, the aristocratic Jefferson was also an avid oenophile. When he was ambassador to France he spent much of his time visiting the vineyards of Bordeaux and Burgundy, buying wine for his own collection and on behalf of his friends back home. He is also associated with two other bottles of very pricy wine, a 1775 Sherry ($43,500) and the most expensive white wine ever sold, a 1787 Chateau d’Yquem ($56,588).

Of course none of these wines are actually drinkable now; it is unusual for even the best Bordeaux to last more than 50 years, and 200 years is beyond any wine’s limit. The allure of these high-priced bottles of vinegar, and other wines of its ilk, is purely in the joy of collecting, not consuming. The 1787 Lafite was explicitly bought as a piece of Jefferson memorabilia, not as a bottle of wine, and it now resides in the Forbes Collection in New York. These wines are rather like old stamps, something to be collected, horded but never used, and they command such high prices not because of their utility but because of their scarcity and consequent appeal to collectors.

Compiling a list of the World’s Most Expensive Bottles of Wine is not as simple as it might first appear. How do you compare the price paid for a double magnum–that’s four bottles–to a single bottle? Do you rate them on the same scale or do you divide the price of the big bottle by four in order to determine its per-single bottle price?

So, rather than compiling a league table we determined 11 separate categories, then sought out the most expensive bottle in each category, and a pretty interesting search it turned out to be. One of the first things you’ll notice is that all the wines on the list were sold at auction, because, except in rare occasions, the seller knows that the publicity surrounding a special bottle, and the heated atmosphere of competitive bidding, often results in even higher prices.

The world’s most expensive bottle of wine that could actually be drunk today is also the most expensive wine ever sold in America, a Montrachet 1978 from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti that was hammered down at Sotheby’s (nyse: BID – news – people ) in New York in 2001. The lot of seven bottles fetched $167,500, or $23,929 per bottle. This is an extraordinary price for a white wine, even in the rarified world of wine collecting. What happened was that two avid collectors were bidding against each other and got carried away, each refusing to yield as the price rose through the stratosphere.

Michael Broadbent, the former head of Christie’s wine department, relates a similar story concerning the sale of the Jefferson Lafite. As the bidding approached £100,000 for this unique bottle, he changed bid steps, that is the amount the bids increased by. One of the two remaining bidders was Marvin Shanken, publisher of the Wine Spectator, and according to Broadbent, he didn’t notice the change until, to his very obvious horror, he realized that he had just offered to pay £100,000 for one bottle of wine. As he sat there ashen faced a great hush fell over the packed auction room as everyone waited to see if the other bidder, Christopher Forbes, would come back in. He eventually did, at £105,000, much to Shanken’s very palpable relief.

Then there is the strange case of the most expensive bottle of wine never sold. In 1989 William Sokolin, a New York wine merchant, had a bottle of Chateau Margaux 1787, also with Jefferson’s initials, on consignment from its English owner. He was asking $500,000 for it but had had no cash offers when he took it along to a Chateau Margaux dinner at the Four Seasons restaurant. (Why would it cost so much more than the 1787 Lafite? It didn’t cost more than the Lafite, just that Sokolin was asking $500,000. I don’t think he expected to get this much and had had no offers by the time of the accident. However, just by asking such a huge sum he generated a lot of publicity, which some people speculate was the whole point of the exercise. He did however get $225,000 from the insurance company which he claims, with some justification, makes it the world’s most expensive bottle, even if it was never sold. Besides everything else it’s a fun story about a very expensive bottle however you rate it.)

At the end of the evening he was getting ready to leave when a waiter carrying a coffee tray bumped the bottle, breaking it. Luckily, Sokolin had the foresight to insure his valuable vin, and shared the $225,000 payout with the owner, which makes this the world’s most expensive broken bottle of wine. History does not tell us what happened to the unfortunate waiter.

What all these wines have in common, whether it’s the undrinkable 1787 Lafite or the eminently drinkable 1945 Mouton, and what makes them command such astronomic prices, is their scarcity value.

The world seems to have an ever-increasing appetite for collecting unusual old things, be they baseball cards, 1950s Formica furniture or steam train memorabilia, and it’s only natural that rare wines are subject to this same collecting mania.

Now, with more and more people discovering the pleasures of drinking wine, especially the newly rich of China and East Asia, the prices of all fine wines will continue to rise and it will only be a matter of time before Mr. Jefferson’s bottle, and several others on our list, see their formally eye-popping prices surpassed as ever richer and ever more determined collectors compete for that one, must-have bottle of wine.

www.forbes.com

The most expensive tea in the world is the original Da Hong Pao (Big Red Robe) from Wuyi China. In 2002, 20 grams (about 2/3rds of an ounce) of Da Hong Pao sold for 180,000 RMB, which is approximately $23,000 US. In 2004, this same quantity sold for 166,000 RMB, or about $21,000. The original Da Hong Pao tea trees are over 350 years old. The tea has only been available for a public auction sale three times (1998, 2002 and 2004). Previously, it has only been offered to leaders of government, emperors, religious leaders, etc. In 1972, Mao Zedong gave President Richard Nixon 50 grams of this tea during his visit to China. As the story goes, Nixon was apparently insulted with such a “small” gift. That is, until someone pointed out that 50 grams represented 50% of all the Da Hong Pao harvested that year.

Fortunately for tea connoiseurs, cuttings (i.e. genetic clones) of Da Hong Pao have been taken from the original plants and grown commercially. Due to this clonal propagation, “secondary” Da Hong Pao tea is readily available at an affordable price to everyday consumers.