Tasters savor fine wine that orbited Earth
It tastes like rose petals. It smells like a campfire. It glistens with a burnt-orange hue. What is it? A 5,000-euro bottle of Petrus Pomerol wine that spent a year in space.
Researchers in Bordeaux are analyzing a dozen bottles of the precious liquid — along with 320 snippets of Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon grapevines — that returned to Earth in January after a sojourn aboard the International Space Station.
They announced their preliminary impressions — mainly, that weightlessness didn’t ruin the wine and it seemed to energize the vines.
Organizers say it’s part of a longer-term effort to make plants on Earth more resilient to climate change and disease by exposing them to new stresses, and to better understand the aging process, fermentation and bubbles in wine.
At a one-of-a-kind tasting this month, 12 connoisseurs sampled one of the space-traveled wines, blindly tasting it alongside a bottle from the same vintage that had stayed in a cellar.
A special pressurized device delicately uncorked the bottles at the Institute for Wine and Vine Research in
Bordeaux. The tasters solemnly sniffed, stared and eventually, sipped.
“I have tears in my eyes,” Nicolas Gaume, CEO and co-founder of the company that arranged the experiment, Space Cargo Unlimited, told The Associated Press.
Alcohol and glass are normally prohibited on the International Space Station, so each bottle was packed inside a special steel cylinder during the journey.
At a news conference Wednesday, Gaume said the experiment focused on studying the lack of gravity — which “creates tremendous stress on any living species” — on the wine and vines. only survived the journey but also grew faster than vines on Earth, despite limited light and water.
Once the researchers determine why, Lebert said that could help scientists develop sturdier vines on Earth — and pave the way for grape-growing and wine-making in space.
Christophe Chateau of the Bordeaux Wine-Makers’ Council welcomed the research as “a good thing for the industry,” but predicted it would take a decade or more to lead to practical applications. Chateau, who was not involved in the project, described ongoing efforts to adjust grape choices and techniques to adapt to ever-warmer temperatures.
“We are only at the beginning,” “The wine of Bordeaux is he said, calling a wine that gets its singularity the preliminary results “encouraging.” from its history but also from its innovations,”
Jane Anson, a wine expert he told The AP. “And we and writer with the should never stop innovating.” wine publication Decanter, said the wine that remained Private investors helped on Earth tasted “a little fund the project, which the younger than the one that researchers hope to continue had been to space.” on further space missions.
Chemical and biological The cost wasn’t disclosed. analysis of the wine’s aging For the average process could allow scientists earthling, the main question to find a way to artificially is: What does cosmic age fine vintages, said wine taste like?
Dr. Michael Lebert, a biologist “For me, the difference at Germany’s Friedrich-Alexander-University between the space and earth wine ... it wasn’t easy who was consulted on the to define,” said Franck Dubourdieu, project. a Bordeaux-based
The vine snippets — agronomist and oenologist, known as canes in the an expert in the study of grape-growing world — not wine and wine-making.