A bottle of wine was launched into space. Here’s the taste of now

But a group of French wine connoisseurs detected a hint of stardust in their last tasting, after becoming the first people in the world to taste and evaluate wines that spent a year in space.

So – what does cosmic wine taste like?

“I found that there was a difference in color and aromas and also in flavor,” wine writer Jane Anson told CNN on Thursday.

“It looked a little older, a little more evolved than the wine that remained on Earth,” she said, adding that the tannins in cosmic wine were more evolved and had a more floral character.

The group of experts tasted the wine next to another glass of the same variety that had stayed on Earth, before being informed which was which.

And Anson concluded that his adventure above the stratosphere added about two to three years of maturity to the drink.

“It is definitely not every day that you are asked to taste a wine that has already been in space,” said Anson. “If you were going to drink tonight, then probably the one in space is a little bit 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 2,000 bottle was chosen by the organizers because it is popular with drinkers and proved to be a good vintage, which means that there were too many tasting notes to compare with the cosmic version.

A common bottle of the vintage that inhabits the Earth would cost around US $ 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 changed during their time in space, where the effects of microgravity and greater exposure to radiation than on Earth accelerate genetic changes. Scientists will compare the vines with specimens that have remained on Earth, with the aim of adapting the vines to grow in more hostile environments.

Philippe Darriet, project organizer and director of the Oenological Research Unit at the Institute of Vine, Science and Wine, told CNN that, for 14 months, wine was “in different aging conditions” than on Earth.

“The question we asked was: Did these aroma-giving components, the flavor-giving components, evolve differently when the wine was in space?”

12 bottles were sent, of which only one was tasted. The others will now be analyzed in more detail, he added.

And Darriet is also looking forward to seeing the analysis of the vines that were shipped with the bottles. “Perhaps this type of work will allow us, in the future, to have plants with different adaptive properties, in relation to the problems of climate change”, he said.

CNN’s Jack Guy contributed to this report.