Cosmic mouthful: Tasters savor fine wine that orbited earth

BORDEAUX, France (AP) — It tastes like rose petals. It smells like a campfire. It glistens with a burnt-orange hue. What is it? A 5,000-euro bottle of Chateau Petrus Pomerol wine that spent a year in space.

Researchers in Bordeaux are analyzing a dozen bottles of the precious liquid – along with 320 snippets of Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon grapevines – that returned to Earth in January after a sojourn aboard the International Space Station.

They’re releasing preliminary results Wednesday, as part of a longer-term effort to make plants on earth more resilient to climate change and disease by exposing them to new stresses, and to better understand the aging process, fermentation and bubbles in wine.

At a one-of-a-kind tasting this month, 12 connoisseurs sampled one of the space-traveled wines, blindly tasting it alongside a bottle from the same vintage that had stayed in a cellar.

“I have tears in my eyes,” said Nicolas Gaume, CEO and co-founder of the company that arranged the experiment, Space Cargo Unlimited, as the bottles were carefully uncorked at the Institute for Wine and Vine Research in Bordeaux.

“When you expose wine, when you expose cells, plants to an environment without gravity...we create tremendous stress on any living species,” he said.

Jane Anson, a wine expert and writer with The Decanter, said the wine that remained on earth tasted “a little younger than the one that had been to space.”

Chemical and biological analysis of the wine’s aging process could allow scientists to find a way to artificially age fine vintages, said Dr. Michael Lebert, a biologist at Germany’s Friedrich-Alexander-University.

The vine snippets -- known as canes in the grape-growing world -- not only all survived the journey but also grew faster than...