Space wine a star performer for tasters

A dozen bottles of French wine which spent a year on the International Space Station have been sampled by experts to see what changes zero gravity has had.

Twelve connoisseurs blindly tasted the wines, including a £4,312 bottle of Chateau Petrus Pomerol, alongside bottles from the same vintage that had stayed in a cellar.

“I have tears in my eyes,” said Nicolas Gaume, CEO and co-founder of the company that arranged the experiment, Space Cargo Unlimited, as the bottles were uncorked at the Institute for Wine and Vine Research in Bordeaux.

“When you expose wine, when you expose cells, plants to an environment without gravity… we create tremendous stress on any living species,” he said.

Jane Anson, a writer for The Decanter, said the wine that stayed on Earth tasted “a little younger than the one that had been to space”.

The purpose of the mission, which included sending live vine snippets to space, was part of a long-term effort to make plants on Earth more resilient to climate change and disease by exposing them to new stresses, and to better understand ageing and fermentation.

Experts said the wine tasted like rose petals, smelled like a campfire or cured leather, and glistened with a “burnt-orange hue”.

‘Floral aromatics’

“The one that had remained on Earth, for me, was still a bit more closed, a bit more tannic, a bit younger. And the one that had been up into space, the tannins had softened, the side of more floral aromatics came out,” Ms Anson said.

It’s not the first time humans mixed alcohol with spaceflight. In 1966, before his first moonwalk, Buzz Aldrin took a sip of wine as part of the Catholic ceremony of communion. “I poured a thimbleful of wine from a sealed plastic container into a small chalice, and waited for the wine to settle down as it swirled in the one-sixth Earth gravity of the moon,” he wrote in his memoir, Magnificent Desolation.