But a group of French wine connoisseurs detected a splash of star dust at the latest tasting, after they became the first people in the world to taste and review wine that has spent a year in space.
So – what does cosmic wine taste like?
“We found that there is a difference in both color, aroma and taste,” wine writer Jane Anson told CNN on Thursday.
“It felt a little older, a little more evolved than the wine left on Earth,” she said, adding that the tannins in the cosmic wine were more evolved and more floral.
The group of experts tasted the wine with another glass of the same variety that had remained on Earth, before being told which was which.
And Anson concluded that his adventure above the stratosphere added a maturity of about two to three years to the drink.
The organizers chose a popular Merlot from 2000 for the project.
Philippe Lopez / AFP / Getty Images
“Certainly not every day you are asked to taste a wine that has been in space,” said Anson. “If you were going to drink it tonight, the one who was in space is probably a little more ready to drink. It was a little more open,” she said.
Chateau Petrus is the most famous winery in Pomerol, a village in Bordeaux known for its Merlot production.
Anson explained that a 2000 bottle was chosen by the organizers because it is popular with drinkers and proved to be a good harvest, which means that there were numerous tasting notes to compare the cosmic version.
An ordinary bottle, which lives on Earth, would cost somewhere around $ 6,000.
Wine and vines left Earth in two transports in November 2019 and March 2020 and landed on our planet near Cape Canaveral, Florida, in January.
They are now being analyzed to see how they have changed in space during their time, where the effects of microgravity and higher radiation exposure than on Earth are accelerating genetic changes. Scientists will compare the vines with the specimens left on Earth, in order to adapt the vines to grow in harsher environments.
Philippe Darriet, the project’s organizer and director of the Institute for Research in Oenology of Vine, Science and Wine, told CNN that for 14 months, the wine was “in different aging conditions” than it was on Earth.
“The question we asked ourselves was, did these flavor-giving components, the flavor-giving components, 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 is also eager to see the analysis of the vines that were sent with the bottles. “Perhaps this type of work will allow us in the future to have plants that acquire different adaptive properties, in relation to the problems of climate change,” he said.
CNN’s Jack Guy contributed to this report.