A bottle of Pétrus 2000 wine that was "aged" for 14 months aboard the International Space Station is now for sale by Christie's. They expect it to fetch around $1 million. A terrestrial bottle of the same wine will be included so the buyer can compare the two. The bottles are stored inside a custom space-themed case that includes a corkscrew "made from a meteorite."
From Christie's:
On 2 November 2019 Space Cargo Unlimited, in partnership with Thales Alenia Space and Nanoracks, sent 12 bottles of wine to the ISS for 14 months aboard a Cygnus capsule (Northrop Grumman), before returning to Earth on 14 January 2021 aboard a Dragon spacecraft (SpaceX). This was the first privately led, applied-research program named Mission WISE (Vitis Vinum in Spatium Experimentia), which over the course of six experiments, seeks to research how plants adapt to the stress of space conditions to develop innovative solutions for the future of food and agriculture on Earth.
From the BBC:
After more than 400 days in space, travelling around 300 million km (186 million miles) in zero gravity, the wine returned to Earth in January 2021.
Scientists analysed it and a group of wine tasters got to try a batch at the University of Bordeaux's wine institute in March, to compare it with Earth-aged bottles. Jane Anson, journalist and author of Inside Bordeaux, was one of the lucky few.
"It's hard for me to say if it was better or worse. But it was definitely different," she told the BBC. "The aromatics were more floral and more smoky – the things that would happen anyway to Petrus as it gets older."
