BORDEAUX – 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.