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As a lover of both wine and space, I was pleased to hear a year ago that a dozen bottles of French wine, along with snippets of grapevines, had been sent to the International Space Station.

The mission was part of an effort to make plants on Earth hardier and more resistant to climate change, and to better understand the ageing process in wines.

It was also an attempt to see whether grapevines could be grown up there so that wine could be made in the great beyond, which is incredibly important if we’re going to try to live on Mars at some point.

Not sarcastic – wine is important, which is why we drink the good stuff.

Anyway, those bottles and vines have returned, with one of them, a £4 312 (upwards of R89 000) bottle of Chateau Petrus Pomerol, blind-tasted by 12 connoisseurs alongside a bottle from the same vintage that had stayed in a cellar.

Here’s one of them, via Sky News.

“For me, the difference between the space and the earth wine… it wasn’t easy to define,” said Franck Dubourdieu, a Bordeaux-based agronomist and oenologist, an expert in the study of wine and wine-making.

Jane Anson, a wine expert and writer for The Decanter, on the other hand, said that the wine that stayed on Earth tasted “a little younger than the one that had been to space”.

Image: One of the bottles of Chateau Petrus Pomerol that spent a year on the International Space Station, AP

I guess the jury is out on the difference, then.

Perhaps more interesting than the slightly altered wines are the hundreds of snippets of Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon grapevines that not only all survived the journey, but also grew faster than vines on Earth.

Image: Snippets of grapevines that spent a year on the International Space Station, AP

Research is underway to find out why.

Watch the experts taste the wine and comment on the experience, as well as some information on those rapidly growing vines:

Experts reckoned the wine tasted like “petals, smelled like a campfire or cured leather, and glistened with a burnt-orange hue”.

All of them agreed that both the space wine and the Earth wine were “beautiful”.

[source:skynews]