British auction house Christie’s is selling a bottle of wine that spent 14 months in orbit aboard the International Space Station.
According to the auction house, a wine connoisseur could get up to $1 million for it. The Pétrus 2000 is one of 12 bottles sent into space by researchers investigating the possibility of extraterrestrial agriculture in November 2019. The company said its so-called Mission WISE marked the world’s first private applied space research program.
“This bottle of Petrus 2000 marks a momentous step in the pursuit of developing and gaining a greater understanding of the maturation of wine,” Tim Triptree, international director of the auctioneer’s wine and spirits department, said in a statement.
A dozen bottles of Petrus were returned to Earth from the space station in January of this year aboard a SpaceX cargo capsule after nearly 440 days, or approximately 186 million miles (300 million km) in orbit.
According to the reports, the wine was returned to Bordeaux, where a bottle was opened for a blind taste test by a dozen leading connoisseurs at the Institute for Wine and Vine Research, who compared it to controlled samples of the same vintage Petrus that had remained on Earth.
Christie’s has stated that an unopened bottle of the space-aged collection, as well as a matching bottle of the original Earth-bound Petrus 2000, would be available for immediate purchase through its private sales, along with a decanter, a set of glasses, and a corkscrew fashioned from a meteorite.
As per the wine investment platform Vinovest, a single bottle of vintage 2000 Petrus from a 28-acre estate that produces only about 30,000 bottles per year would normally cost $5,366, but one sold at auction for $51,660 in 2018.
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