But a group of French wine connoisseurs discovered a splash of stardust at their latest tasting, after being the first people in the world to taste and review wine that spent a year in space.
So – what does cosmic wine taste like?
“I found there was a difference in color and aromatics and also in taste,” wine writer Jane Anson told CNN on Thursday.
“It just felt a little older, a little more evolved than the wine left on Earth,” she said, adding that the cosmic wine’s tannins were more evolved and had a more floral character.
The group of experts tasted the wine alongside another glass of the same kind that had remained on Earth before being told which was which.
And Anson concluded that his adventure above the stratosphere added about two to three years of maturity to the drink.
The organizers chose a popular Merlot from 2000 for the project.
Philippe Lopez / AFP / Getty Images
“It is certainly not every day that you are asked to taste a wine that has been in space,” said Anson. “If you were going to drink it tonight, whoever was in the room would probably be a little more ready to drink. It was a little more open,” she said.
Chateau Petrus is the most famous winery in Pomerol, a Bordeaux village known for its Merlot production.
Anson explained that the organizers chose a bottle from 2000 because it is popular with drinkers and has proven to be a good vintage, meaning there were plenty of tasting notes to compare the cosmic version with.
A regular bottle of the vintage living on the earth would cost somewhere around $ 6,000.
The wine and vines left Earth in two shipments in November 2019 and March 2020 and landed back on our planet near Cape Canaveral, Florida in January.
They are now being analyzed to see how they have changed during their time in space, where the effects of microgravity and higher radiation exposure than on Earth accelerate genetic changes. Scientists will compare the vines to specimens left on Earth, with the aim of adapting vines to grow in rougher environments.
Philippe Darriet, the project organizer and director of the Oenology Research Unit Institute of Vines, Science and Wine, told CNN that the wine was “in different aging conditions” than on Earth for 14 months.
“The question we asked was, did these components that impart aroma, the components that impart flavor, evolve differently when the wine was in space?”
A total of 12 bottles were sent, of which only one was tasted. The others will now be further analyzed, he added.
And Darriet would also like to see an analysis of the vines that were sent next to the bottles. “Perhaps in the future this kind of work will allow us to allow plants to acquire different adaptive properties in relation to climate change problems,” he said.
CNN’s Jack Guy contributed to this report.