Wine that went to space now for sale with $1 million price tag

LONDON – The wine is out of this world. The value is appropriately stratospheric.

Christie’s stated Tuesday it’s promoting a bottle of French wine that spent greater than a 12 months in orbit aboard the Worldwide House Station. The public sale home thinks a wine connoisseur would possibly pay as a lot as $1 million to personal it.

The Pétrus 2000 is considered one of 12 bottles despatched into house in November 2019 by researchers exploring the potential for extraterrestrial agriculture. It returned 14 months later subtly altered, in line with wine consultants who sampled it at a tasting in France.

Tim Tiptree, worldwide director of Christie’s wine and spirits division, stated the space-aged wine was “matured in a novel atmosphere” of close to zero-gravity aboard the house station.

The journey turned a $10,000-a-bottle wine identified for its complexity, silky, ripe tannins and flavors of black cherry, cigar field and leather-based right into a scientific novelty — and nonetheless a wonderful bottle of wine, Tiptree stated.

Advert

“It’s only a very harmonious wine that has the power to age beautifully, which is why it was chosen for this experiment,” he stated. “It’s very encouraging that it was scrumptious on return to Earth.”

Non-public house startup House Cargo Limitless despatched the wine into orbit in November 2019 as a part of an effort to make crops on Earth extra resilient to local weather change and illness by exposing them to new stresses. Researchers additionally wish to higher perceive the growing old course of, fermentation and bubbles in wine.

At a style take a look at in March on the Institute for Wine and Vine Analysis in Bordeaux, France, a dozen wine connoisseurs in contrast one of many space-traveled wines to a bottle from the identical classic that had stayed in a cellar.

Advert