Are Nordic countries to blame for this style? Naples in particular but Italy and also France are known for a pretty acid coffee.
Specialty coffee isn't just a buzzword too although it is often used as one. It specifically refers to green (raw) coffee rated 80-100 by a qualified grader. When you are paying good money for a quality coffee it doesn't make much sense to roast out the individual characteristics of the coffee i.e you either roast off the acidity and the aromatics or you keep the aromatics but accept higher levels of acidity.
I travelled to Italy and France before I got into specialty coffee. At the time the style of coffee in Italy at best was a nice simple chocolate/caramel/toffee cup. Not overly acidic at all. All the coffees I had in France were terrible. The best way to describe them would be ashtray/bitter. I know in later years people from the Australian scene moved to (or back to) Paris and opened shops importing specialty coffee from other European countries or just started roasting their own.
To be fair thought you can't talk about coffee without taking price into consideration. Quality varies wildly too within a given market even though price may stay the same. A few anecdotal experiences in different cities can have you comparing the equivalent of a loaf of bread purchased at the supermarket to a loaf of bread baked by an artisan.
They grabbed me the next coffee off the line of pre-made Nespressos that were sitting in a bench out back.
Ran into people competing in barista championships there, so yeah, you can get decent coffee there.
Yeah, so I respectively disagree. The best coffee I've ever had was from Caffè Artigiano in Vancouver.