After spending 14 months aboard the International Space Station (ISS), 12 bottles of French wine have returned to Earth. A bottle, Pétrus from the year 2000, is now being auctioned by Christie’s, which lists the estimated price of the bottle at $1 million. A 750-milliliter bottle typically fetches several thousand dollars.
They spent almost 440 days in space, or the equivalent of 300 trips to the Moon, Space Cargo Unlimited Nicolas Gaume said in a press release.
The wine being sold by Christie’s in a private sale comes with the whole experience. The unique bottle of space-aged Petrus is offered in a unique trunk, handcrafted by the Parisian Maison d’Arts Les Ateliers Victor, alongside a bottle of terrestrial Petrus 2000 so that the buyer can compare and mark the difference between the one from space and the one from earth. It also has its own decanter, glasses and a corkscrew made from a meteorite.
The bottles were sent into space in November 2019 and were part of a biological research project led by NASA and France’s Space Cargo Unlimited (SCU) to explore the potential for extraterrestrial agriculture. Reportedly, researchers also wanted to better understand the aging process, fermentation and bubbles in wine.
It returned 14 months later subtly altered, according to experts who sampled it at a tasting in France. A panel of 12 tasters, including French enologist Franck Dubourdieu, sat down to find out and compared the wines against a control group of the same vintage which had not slipped the surly bonds of Earth. They noted a difference that was hard to describe. Jane Anson, a writer with the publication Decanter, said the wine that remained on Earth tasted a bit younger, the space version slightly softer and more aromatic.
Tim Tiptree, international director of Christie’s wine and spirits department, said the space-aged wine was “matured in a unique environment” of near zero-gravity aboard the space station.
“The trip turned a $10,000-a-bottle wine known for its complexity, silky, ripe tannins and flavours of black cherry, cigar box and leather into a scientific novelty—and still a fine bottle of wine,” Tiptree said.
“It’s just a very harmonious wine that has the ability to age superbly, which is why it was chosen for this experiment,” he said. “It’s very encouraging that it was delicious on return to Earth.”
The proceeds of the sale will go towards funding future space missions, while also contributing to ongoing research.
