ROME - British auction house Christie's offers lovers and collectors of fine wine a more unique than rare opportunity: it has announced that a bottle of French wine aged for over a year in orbit around the Earth will be put on sale.
It is a Pétrus 2000, made from Merlot grapes in the Bordeaux region, which Space Cargo Unlimited sent with another 11 bottles of wine to the International Space Station (ISS) in November 2019, as part of a research study on privately funded food and agriculture. After more than 400 days in space, the bottles then returned to Earth in January 2021 and now Christie's has announced that Pétrus 2000 will be available for purchase through its private sales.
However, the price will be stellar. The auction house, reports BBC online, estimates it at around one million dollars.
As part of the research, scientists analyzed the wine after it returned to Earth and a group of sommeliers had the opportunity to try a batch at the Bordeaux University wine institute in March, to compare it with bottles aged in the earth. . Jane Anson, journalist and author of Inside Bordeaux, was one of them: "It's hard for me to say if it was better or worse. But it was definitely different," she told the BBC. "The aromas were more floral and smokier, which would have happened to Petrus anyway with aging" on earth.