May 5 (UPI) — Auction house Christie’s announced a bottle of French wine that spent more than a year aging on the International Space Station is expected to sell for around $1 million.
Christie’s said the bottle of Petrus 2000 was one of a dozen bottles of wine that were launched into orbit in 2019 and spent nearly 440 days in space before being brought back to earth.
A bottle of the wine that spent time in space was compared to a bottle that aged on Earth in a tasting that featured a dozen wine professionals and scientists, and the panel said the space bottle was found to have its own unique flavor profile.
“The aromatics were more floral and more smoky — the things that would happen anyway to Petrus as it gets older,” Jane Anson, a journalist and wine researcher who participated in the tasting, told the BBC.
Christie’s said the bottle of wine is being sold with a second bottle that was aged on Earth so the buyer can compare the two. The sale also includes “a decanter, glasses and a corkscrew made from a meteorite.”
“After spending almost 440 days in space, or the equivalent of 300 trips to the moon, legendary Bordeaux wine Petrus comes back having been transformed in a way which is, literally, out of this world,” Nicolas Gaume, CEO of Space Cargo Unlimited, the startup that sent the wine to the space station, said in a Christie’s news release.
Christie’s said the wine bottle is available immediately through a private sale, with proceeds going toward funding future space missions and wine research.