The International Space Station on Tuesday brought 12 bottles of Bordeaux wine and hundreds of fragments of vines that spent a year orbiting the world in the name of science.
Wine and vines – and thousands of pounds of other equipment and research, including mice – will overflow aboard a Dragon SpaceX capsule Wednesday night in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Tampa.
The French wine bottles – each bottle placed in a steel cylinder to prevent breakage – remained rafts aboard the orbiting laboratory.
None of the bottles will be open until the end of February. Then Space Cargo Unlimited, the company behind the experiments, will open a bottle or two for a tasting in Bordeaux by some of France’s best connoisseurs. Months of chemical testing will follow. Researchers are eager to see how space has changed sedimentation and bubbles.
Agricultural science has been the main goal, said Nicolas Gaume, CEO and co-founder of the company, although he admits it will be fun to taste the wine.
“Our goal is to address the solution to how we will have agriculture tomorrow that is both organic and healthy and able to feed humanity, and we believe that space is key,” said Gaume de la Bordeaux.
With climate change, Gaume said agricultural products, such as grapes, will have to adapt to harsher conditions. Through a series of space experiments, Space Cargo Unlimited hopes to take the lessons learned from plant stress in weight and translate them into more robust and resilient plants on Earth.
There is another benefit. Gaume is waiting for future explorers on the Moon, and Mars will want to enjoy some of the pleasures of Earth. “Being French, 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 provide the cost of the project.
Wine took a walk to the space station in November 2019 aboard a Northrop Grumman supply ship. The fragments of Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon vines, called sticks in the grape business, were launched by SpaceX last March.