Tasting notes: Plum, red wine.

Coffee breakdown:
Country: India
Variety: Hemavathi
Process: Vacuum-shocked Natural
Producer: Ashok Patre

Ratnagiri means Pearl Mountain, a nod to the silver oak canopy that shades this farm in the hills of Chikmagalur. It's a fitting name for one of India's most quietly remarkable estates, and one of its most restlessly experimental.

The Patre family has farmed here for generations, and under Ashok Patre, now working alongside Divya, Ratnagiri has become a byword for innovation in Indian coffee. The estate runs less like a traditional farm than a laboratory in the forest, where brix is measured before harvest and fermentation is steered with lab-grown cultures and precision equipment. It's also a genuine haven: Rainforest Alliance certified, farmed organically under three storeys of shade, and alive with birdlife, monkeys, and the occasional leopard or elephant passing through.

This lot shows just how far the estate is willing to push. It's a vacuum-shocked natural, made with the Hemavathi variety. The cherries first ferment whole for 48 hours with a specific microbe culture, DIV52, in sealed biofermenters. Then comes the vacuum shock: the sealed vessel is put under high vacuum, drawing the fermented mosto deep back into the fruit and, with it, layers of flavour. Only then are the cherries laid out to dry slowly on raised beds across 29 days.

It's a bold, modern technique in expert hands, and the payoff is a rich, deeply fruited cup, all plum and red wine. Another reminder that Indian specialty coffee, in the right place, can stand with anything in the world.