Cheers! French wine, vines headed home after year in space
Last updated on: 13 January,2021 08:32 pm
Cheers! French wine, vines headed home after year in space
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — The International Space Station bid adieu Tuesday to 12 bottles of French Bordeaux wine and hundreds of snippets of grapevines that spent a year orbiting the world in the name of science.
SpaceX’s Dragon cargo capsule undocked with the wine and vines — and thousands of pounds of other gear and research, including mice — and aimed for a splashdown Wednesday night in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Tampa. The Atlantic had been targeted, but poor weather shifted the arrival to Florida’s other side. SpaceX’s supply ships previously parachuted into the Pacific.
The carefully packed wine — each bottle nestled inside a steel cylinder to prevent breakage — remained corked aboard the orbiting lab. Space Cargo Unlimited, a Luxembourg startup behind the experiments, wanted the wine to age for an entire year up there.
None of the bottles will be opened until the end of February. That’s when the company will pop open a bottle or two for an out-of-this-world wine tasting in Bordeaux by some of France’s top connoisseurs and experts. Months of chemical testing will follow. Researchers are eager to see how space altered the sedimentation and bubbles.
Agricultural science is the primary objective, stresses Nicolas Gaume, the company’s CEO and co-founder, although he admits it will be fun to sample the wine. He’ll be among the lucky few taking a sip.