What Does a $6,000 Bottle of Wine Taste Like After a Year In Space? (vice.com) 101
PolygamousRanchKid shares a report from Motherboard: In November 2019, twelve bottles of Chateau Petrus 2000 -- a rare and expensive red wine from Bordeaux, France -- hitched a ride to the International Space Station aboard a Northrop Grumman spacecraft. It was followed several months later by 320 snippets of grapevine, or canes, of Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon. For a year, both viticultural products were exposed to the unique stress of the station's microgravity environment. On January 1st, the wine bottles and canes returned to earth aboard a SpaceX cargo vessel, and were hurried back to the Institute of Vine and Wine Science (ISVV) at the University of Bordeaux. Researchers have already begun analyzing the changes they underwent while in orbit, and during a press conference on Wednesday, revealed their preliminary findings. They had also, of course, tasted the wine.
To the surprise of researchers, all 320 vine snippets survived the stay in space. Some have since been replanted, and the results have been astounding. "They are developing much, much faster than the normal canes -- the ones that are coming back from space," said Dr. Michel Lebert, SCU's Chief Science Officer. The wine, to the delight of the experiment's organizers, also appears to have undergone significant changes. "With the one that had been in space, I would say the differences that I found most were with heightened floral characteristics," said Jane Ansen, a wine writer with a diploma in wine-tasting from ISVV. "I would probably say that the Petrus 2000 that had been on the ISS was maybe one, two, even three years further evolved that you would expect compared to the one that had remained on earth,"; she said.
"When the Earth environment is recreated in space, like on the ISS, the only parameter that changes from Earth is near-zero gravity," said Nicolas Gaume, CEO of Space Cargo Unlimited. "This exposes life on the ISS to immense stress." The researchers hypothesize that this stress, promoted by microgravity, expedited the natural aging process taking place in the wine bottles, and led the canes to develop a resiliency that is contributing to their rapid growth back on earth. If their theory is correct, the implications could be significant for a future in which climate change threatens to disrupt agricultural production. "If the vines find a way to evolve so that they are more naturally resistant to stress on Earth, then that opens very exciting possibilities for all of us," said Gaume.
To the surprise of researchers, all 320 vine snippets survived the stay in space. Some have since been replanted, and the results have been astounding. "They are developing much, much faster than the normal canes -- the ones that are coming back from space," said Dr. Michel Lebert, SCU's Chief Science Officer. The wine, to the delight of the experiment's organizers, also appears to have undergone significant changes. "With the one that had been in space, I would say the differences that I found most were with heightened floral characteristics," said Jane Ansen, a wine writer with a diploma in wine-tasting from ISVV. "I would probably say that the Petrus 2000 that had been on the ISS was maybe one, two, even three years further evolved that you would expect compared to the one that had remained on earth,"; she said.
"When the Earth environment is recreated in space, like on the ISS, the only parameter that changes from Earth is near-zero gravity," said Nicolas Gaume, CEO of Space Cargo Unlimited. "This exposes life on the ISS to immense stress." The researchers hypothesize that this stress, promoted by microgravity, expedited the natural aging process taking place in the wine bottles, and led the canes to develop a resiliency that is contributing to their rapid growth back on earth. If their theory is correct, the implications could be significant for a future in which climate change threatens to disrupt agricultural production. "If the vines find a way to evolve so that they are more naturally resistant to stress on Earth, then that opens very exciting possibilities for all of us," said Gaume.
Radiation? (Score:5, Informative)
What about radiation levels? The ISS has more than an order of magnitude more radiation flux than Earth surface.
Re:Radiation? (Score:5, Funny)
"They are developing much, much faster than the normal canes -- the ones that are coming back from space,"
I think it's pretty clear that going to space gives you superpowers. We have known this since the seminal research paper "Fantastic 4 No. 1" was published way back when.
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I think it's pretty clear that going to space gives you superpowers.
I don't know about superpowers but it's guaranteed to change your DNA in a favorable way, yes.
You'll be much stronger and faster when you come down, all your future offspring will also receive the benefits of your super sperm.
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I think it's pretty clear that going to space gives you superpowers.
So. . . . it creates X-Wine ??? (grin)
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I think it's pretty clear that going to space gives you superpowers.
For some folks, if they drink enough alcohol, they think they have superpowers.
Alcohol also causes Beer Goggles [urbandictionary.com].
So I'm wondering does Space Wine make you feel like aliens are more attractive . . . ?
I'm sure that Elon Musk would be willing to try this out for us.
Space Weed . . . coming soon to a store near you really soon.
Hey, it's really spacey!
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I think it's pretty clear that going to space gives you superpowers. We have known this since the seminal research paper "Fantastic 4 No. 1" was published way back when.
Absolutely false. The 4 astronauts described in that paper had the (mis)fortune to pass thru the tail of a rare comet. Plain old
"going to space" does very little.
Turn in your nerd card.
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I don't see it as a major factor.
Genetically Plants are really robust and more complicated than we are, so the effects of a bit of extra radiation (being that the ISS blocks a lot so humans can survive) However a lot of development of plants are based on environmental factors, including gravity.
Wine being a fermented drink itself isn't dead, but hosts a set of microorganisms, allowing them to not settle in 0g is probably a bigger factor than most mutations that happen.
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I don't know whether it's a major factor or not in this particular experiment, but the quoted statement still seems to oversell the services of the guy's company. (And if one can't be pedantic on /., where?)
Thanks for the comment about the microorganisms, though. I had thought that they were already poisoned by ethanol by the bottling stage, but you provoked me to do some reading and it seems to be more interesting than that.
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Most commercial wines stop fermenting because the ph changes or sometimes because the level of sugar drops too low. I make wine at home, and homemade wines generally stop fermenting because the yeast has poisoned itself (much sweeter and fruiter tasting). We've learned to warn people about the alcohol content when we give bottles of it away.
TLDR: it tastes like wine (Score:4, Insightful)
Obviously this needs a followup experiment to check if the duration in space matters. Will it taste well after 50 years in space?
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Fools are quickly separated from their money by marketing department who spout bullshit. I suppose that some rich twats will drink it to brag to their rich friends.
Re:TLDR: it tastes like wine (Score:5, Funny)
Fools are quickly separated from their money by marketing department who spout bullshit. I suppose that some rich twats will drink it to brag to their rich friends.
"My wine, came from Uranus."
"Damn Phillip. No wonder it tastes like shit."
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This.
I but the "tests" weren't double blind and I strongly suspect the wine tasted exactly the same as before it went up there.
Wine matures when it's in barrels, exposed to wood.
After it's been placed in glass bottles? Not so much.
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Corks don't care what kind of booze is behind 'em, they're permeable anyway.
The idea that scotch doesn't age in the bottle is silly. If you're not reducing it to absolute zero, chemical reactions can still occur.
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There is a massive difference in how fast stuff ages in bottles. It's not about the principle but the amount. I've tasted 50 years old vintage port which had barely aged. There are few wines which are drinkable at that age.
Whisky evolves too slowly to bother. With Bordeaux there used to be a rule of thumb to leave it stored for a decade to soften it up. A lot of wine is ment to be drunk within a few years.
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Well no matter what booze certainly ages differently in bottles than in casks, both because it's not losing so much alcohol and also because it's not reacting with the cask.
Personally I basically don't drink wine, I think most of it is gross. Every so often I run into one I like, but it's rare. I don't drink sour beers either. I'm an IPA guy. And they go to shit if aged :)
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Yes the barrel is always the fast stage.
I'll taste anything but I have preferences. I'd certainly appreciate an old Petrus but I'm not willing to pay for them.
And an IPA. Blond, hoppy and often moderate alcohol. Sort of lost interest in the dark beers.
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Wine ages in bottles. A Petrus won't change much between its 19th and 20th year though. It also will vary between bottles of the same year.
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Agreed - I'd want to see the specific testing methodology before believing this isn't ultimately just the figment of some marketer's imagination.
With regards to the vine cuttings, their advanced development sounds suspiciously like what you'd expect if they were exposed to warmer temperatures earlier - I assume the "earth bound" snippets are just now starting to break dormancy after winter. How cold, overall, were they kept while on the station? What sorts of diurnal temperature fluctuations did they experi
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Tax payer dollars for science
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You might be surprised to learn that you can pay to have things launched off the surface of the Earth, it's a bit expensive but the price has been dropping over the last couple of decades. There is a cost for putting it somewhere climate controlled like the ISS, and the canes would have needed attention from the astronauts, which also costs. Taxpayers didn't pay for the experiment, the customer did.
Space tourism (Score:2)
Suppose you turn it the other way round and aren't looking to get improvements from space travel: future tourists who want to spend a short vacation in orbit will have a large budget and won't waste the expensive transport cost on expensive drinks. So they want to have some confirmation that their expensive drinks will not suffer. It's not that they hope the wine improves, it is good enough that it doesn't deteriorate.
Now the real challenge will be that bottle of Krug.
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I meant they won't waste the cost of transport on cheap drinks.
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Will it taste well after 50 years in space?
Funny question to ask when millions of humans think wine tastes like shit 50 seconds after fermented grapes are put in a bottle..
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And does it work equally well on bottles of wine that mere mortals can afford.
Another use for that space elevator....the return line for products flowing from zero-G vineyards. :)
Best,
Priorities (Score:1)
So, you needed to study the components specifically needed for wine making, in a micro-gravity environment? Is it a good or bad thing that we're fighting this hard to ensure alcoholism outlasts our planet?
As if the wine snobs weren't pretentious enough...
"What, your wine wasn't fermented with space snippets? How very 20th Century of you."
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Damn, all this time I thought "microbrewery" meant making wine in a micro-gravity environment.
it has a bouquet (Score:1, Funny)
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I'm not very interested in obscure wines.
However, if they were to stow some audio speaker cables in space for a few years, I'd be interested in listening to the improvement in sound quality.
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Ooh. Oxygen-free copper.
Re:It taste like stupidity (Score:4, Informative)
This was actually done [wikipedia.org], and for this reason French wine organizations ban any kind of blind tasting.
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Imagine being so fragile that you start screaming and banning things because someone said your 1932 white wine vintage made from albino grapes crushed under the feet of a virgin maiden who has never been gazed upon by a man nor uttered a single rude word tastes the same as a random $20 bottle of fermented grape juice ($25 if they left the yeast in to make cham-pag-nay).
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I think you miss the point. If I'm going to drink wine crushed under the feet of a virgin I don't give a fuck what it tastes like so blind testing shouldn't be part of the consideration. :-)
Now you should look up why Nyotaimori tastes so much better than traditional Sushi.
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Only if I can see the feet of the virgin in question -- otherwise, I won't pay.
Tasting would be even better, assuming proper hygiene, and the virgin not being of the Slashdot kind.
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Sometimes it's better to run with the fantasy.
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Champagne is bubbly because it's been bottled while still fermenting. You can't remove yeast from the wine. The majority will get racked out with the lees, but there's still plenty of yeast beasties swimming around in the wine. Yeast continues its work until the ph changes, caused by the build up of carbonic acid (dissolved CO2).
I once bottled some wine while it was still fermenting very slowly (less than one bubble in three minutes). Several months later we had a couple of bottles explode and we had to
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BRB beating up my chemistry teacher.
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LOL
Most commercial wines are filtered, but just to remove the lees (sediment) not to remove the yeast. When I siphon out a 5 gallon carboy of wine there's always a quart or so of wine mixed with sediment in the bottom that I toss, and commercial wineries want to maximize their output. Admittedly most of the yeast stays with the lees, but if they were to filter it fine enough to remove all the yeast they'd also change the color and taste of the wine. Champagne yeast is a special strain that tolerates high
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Of course price isn't determined by quality alone; rarity plays a role, as we can see in the whole NFT fad where rarity really is the major driving of pricing.
At some point drinking quality ceases to be an issue at all. Chateau Lafitte 1787 will set you back over $150k per bottle, but nobody in his right mind would drink the stuff. Even wines that require the most aging peak at around 20 years and probably start to decline at around 50 years, so that 1787 is at least 150 years past its prime. If that bot
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Science enables modern industrial wine makers to combine a variety of grapes, regardless of whether it is a "good" or "bad" year, produce a very good wine
Makers of homemade wines, like myself, don't have this dubious "advantage". The result is that most years my blackberry wine is good, sometimes it's OK, once it failed, and once in a decade I'll have a batch of incredible knock-your-socks-off-good wine. I took a bottle of that to a party once where a professional wine dealer declared it the best wine he had ever tried (admittedly he was schnockered at the time, but he did go to the trouble of contacting me later).
blind tasting "banned" Got any evidence for that ? (Score:5, Informative)
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"The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which."
If you can't tell a molehill from a mountain then you are indeed stupid.
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Totally outrageous that a person with some money would spend it. How terrible.
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Anyone who drinks $5000 wine deserves to be taken out and shot. For two reasons a) because they're pretentious assholes, b) their wine probably tastes subjectively no better than one than one costing 1/40th the price.
Regardless of how useless you think it is, rich people spending money on things is good for the overall economy.
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So no one got paid to care for the vines, harvest the grapes, bottle the wine? No one got paid to take it into space? No one will get a commission for selling this in the future?
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Better than recycled piss I imagine. (Score:2)
Was it a blind test? (Score:2, Informative)
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Not sure why blind people would taste wine differently than other people.
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Not sure why blind people would taste wine differently than other people.
Because blindness heightens the other senses [nih.gov]! Duh!
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Not the only parameter (Score:5, Insightful)
As for the wine, who knows. I do not think that shaking helps it and unless the tasting was done blindly I would guess psychology plays a big role in the experience.
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I wonder about the shaking. There is a short term and a long term aspect to that. In the short run shaking makes all the sediment twirl around but maybe in the long term a regular shaking is good? Old wines do lose flavor because it simply drops out.
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Or at least a straw that long....
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With how often sommeliers are proven to be absolutely terrible at what they presume to be, and the profession considered a joke to other professional restaurant service staff... you may be on to something with your second statement.
I would imagine it tastes like... (Score:2)
Wine Tasting (Score:3)
Enhanced growth (Score:2)
I'm less interested in the wine flavor part of the story so much as the enhanced growth. Is this really the first time plants (or cuttings of a plant) have been brought from space back to earth and been monitored for growth? Seems like something that would have been tried with some staple crops a long time ago.
The microgravity argument feels really speculative. How about the fact that they lived in an artificial air environment? Or were exposed to higher levels of radiation? Or experienced many g's during
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...I'll add to your list, if you don't mind:
I'd bet dollars to donuts that it experienced fewer predatory attacks from other species in space than it would have in its natural setting.
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Good point!
I'll *maybe* believe a microgravity argument if they had identical control cuttings back on earth in a mockup of the ISS, with artificial air and comparable temperatures, and were exposed to similar levels of radiation.
Microgravity is the most "romantic" difference between the ISS and here, but there are a whole bunch more mundane differences.
On the bright side, if they can identify that something other than microgravity is what led to the enhanced growth, that's great news - microgravity is pret
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I'd also worry about the radiation. Most species benefit from radiation.
Humans produce their own radiation as a natural form of essentially cancer treatment -- we call them free-radicals-in-the-body -- that effectively tear holes in living tissue, which tends to break up things like tumors.
Then we have the opposite -- we call them anti-oxidants in food -- that absorb excess free-radicals-in-the-body since those tear through healthy tissue also.
You can balance that game any way you like. But more small rad
Wine doesn't like travel (Score:3)
Especially not >40.000 kilometers traveled every 93 minutes. :-)
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No that part is generally fine. Not sure how it handles 4G though to get to that speed and back.
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"No that part is generally fine. Not sure how it handles 4G though to get to that speed and back."
I hope they organize a tasting before the flight back. :-)
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"Well, where're my 20 bottles of Petrus?"
"We had a meeting on that and decided we couldn't take the risk of putting them through the descent."
"We'll send you the report on our extended tasting!"
Hooey! (Score:3)
Value Option (Score:2)
Probably similar to a bottle of three buck chuck that had spent a year in space?
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They did do a blind tasting, and the ISS wine was the overwhelming winner.
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I doubt many (if any) of these folks who tested the wine could pick which one is the "space wine" if they were blindfolded and given a taste test. Wine tasting is almost 100% bogus. Slap a blindfold on an expert wine taster and suddenly they couldn't tell you the difference between a $500 per bottle wine and a $10 per bottle wine. It is cool that it grew so well and all but when you hear someone mention something like "heightened floral characteristics" you are hearing someone talk out their ass most likely :)
Sorry, but I think your attempts to dismiss an experts opinion on the matter, have failed miserably. Sure, some of them tend to talk shit, but there are a lot of wine experts who are actual experts.
A wine enthusiast spends a good amount of time perfecting their trade. A master mechanic certainly can tell the difference between a Ford and a Ferrari. By sound alone. I'd envision someone tasting wines for a living probably has a palette far better than you or I.
Audio cables? (Score:1)
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Would zero gravity and radiation help remove impurities from copper?
Is the copper being used today in audio cables at 99.999% purity or better?
If not, I'd say we have an impurity problem at sea level to solve first. Or, increasing the quality, doesn't actually do anything beneficial for audio and the human ears listening to it.
unclear headline (Score:2)
After a year in space I'd be pretty thirsty, so I'll bet that a $6000 bottle of wine would taste mighty good.
Stress? (Score:2)
For a year, both viticultural products were exposed to the unique stress of the station's microgravity environment.
Shouldn't that be the unique "lack of stress"?
"Wet tulips on a Tuesday Morning..." (Score:1)
or some similar crap I'm sure.
As the Scots have it: "There are two kinds of whisky: good and very good." They're laughing their kilts off every time some poor s*cker pays exorbitant prices for a bottle of Scotch, and I'm certain it's quite similar with wine.
So, have you ever tasted an expensive wine? (Score:1)
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Yes, and no. Individual taste and smell pallets vary dramatically between people, and experience also makes a big difference. I make wine, and my whole family has for generations. We've never sold it (although I used to occasionally trade it for weed), but I can taste a bottle of Concord grape wine and know if I made it or my grandfather did, and in a couple of cases which year it was from (some are better than others, a couple of his were dreadful).
Having said that, I've had some expensive wines, and di
Small penises (Score:2)
Tiny little wangs. One for each ml. Enough said.
Well how do you know? (Score:2)
"In a blind tasting, eleven of the twelve participants detected differences."
Ok, good, it's blinded...
“With the one that had been in space, I would say the differences that I found..."
Wait, what? You're commenting after unblinding?
Variables in those bottles of wine (Score:1)