The International Space Station said goodbye on Tuesday to 12 bottles of Bordeaux wine and hundreds of pieces of vines that have orbited the world for a year in the name of science.
The wine and vines – and thousands of pounds of other equipment and research, including mice – will splash down in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Tampa Wednesday night aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule.
The bottles of French wine – each bottle nestled in a steel cylinder to prevent breakage – remained corked on board the revolving laboratory.
None of the bottles will be opened until the end of February. That’s when Space Cargo Unlimited, the company behind the experiments, will open a bottle or two for a tasting in Bordeaux by some of the best French connoisseurs. Months of chemical testing will follow. Researchers would like to see how space has changed sedimentation and bubbles.
According to Nicolas Gaume, CEO and co-founder of the company, agricultural science was the primary goal, although he admits it will be fun to taste the wine.
“Our goal is to tackle the solution of how tomorrow we will have an agriculture that is both organic and healthy and can feed humanity, and we think space is key,” Gaume said from Bordeaux.
With climate change, Gaume said agricultural products such as grapes must adapt to more severe conditions. Through a series of space experiments, Space Cargo Unlimited hopes to learn lessons from emphasizing the plants in weightlessness and translate that into more robust and resilient plants on Earth.
There is another benefit. Gaume is expecting future explorers to the Moon and Mars will want to indulge in some of the joys of Earth. “As a Frenchman, it’s part of life to have good food and good wine,” he told the Associated Press.
Gaume said private investors helped fund the experiments. He refused to pay the project costs.
The wine hitchhiked to the space station aboard a Northrop Grumman supply ship in November 2019. The 320 merlot and cabernet sauvignon vine fragments, called canes in grape cultivation, were launched by SpaceX last March.