Space wine: Researchers analyse wine that spent year on ISS

Researchers are tasting bottles of wine and analysing snippets of Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon grapevines that spent a year in space as part of an effort to make plants on Earth more resilient to climate change and disease.

It tastes like rose petals. It smells like a campfire. It glistens with a burnt-orange hue. What is it? A 5,000-euro ($5,900) bottle of Petrus Pomerol wine that spent a year in space. Researchers in Bordeaux are analysing 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 announced their preliminary impressions on Wednesday — mainly, that weightlessness didn’t ruin the wine and it seemed to energise the vines.