About 20 years ago, some grapes from the Bordeaux region of France were picked, crushed and fermented into merlot, just as countless of similar grapes had been before them. Then, in November 2019, those lucky grapes were launched into space.
This space wine — actually 12 bottles of Pétrus 2000 merlot, normally valued at about $6,000 apiece — spent 438 days aboard the International Space Station (ISS), where a team of incredibly disciplined astronauts refrained from drinking it. The wine circled Earth many times, subject to the uncertain effects of microgravity and cosmic radiation, before finally returning to land aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule on Jan. 14, 2021.
Now, one of those bottles of rare cosmic wine can be yours… if you’re a millionaire.