Connoisseurs taste £4,000 bottle of wine that traveled to space

A team of researchers in Bordeaux are analysing a dozen of bottles of French wine which have returned to Earth after spending a year at the International Space Station.

In a bid to make plants on Earth more resilient to climate change and diseases by exposing them to new stresses, the mission was set up to better understand the aging process, fermentation, and bubbles in the wine.

After their return to the Earth, the wine bottles were sampled by 12 connoisseurs. The experts tasted the 5,000 euro (£4,312) bottle of Chateau Petrus Pomerol blindfolded, along with another bottle from the same vintage, procured from a cellar.

"I have tears in my eyes," said Nicolas Gaume, CEO and co-founder of the company that had organised the experiment.

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This tasting took place 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.

One of the experts present at the tasting said the wine poured from the bottle in the cellar tasted a tad younger than the one which had traveled to space.

The experts of chemical and biological analysis of the wine's aging process might be able to find a way to artificially age fine vintages, as per the experts.

In this experiment, hundreds of snippets of Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon grapevines survived the space journey and also grew faster than the vines on the Earth.

However, the researchers have not been able to figure out the reason behind this development yet.

Experts also noted that grapes are very healthy for astronauts. "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.