A bottle of Petrus that traveled 14 months in the ISS space station will soon be offered for sale by Christie’s. Already considered one of the most expensive wines in the world, its price is estimated at 1 million dollars.
This 2000 vintage bottle, which is part of a total batch of 12 bottles sent to the International Space Station in November 2019, returned to earth in early 2021. After 14 months of maturation in orbit, at about 400km from planet earth. It is an initiative imagined by a European start-up (Space Cargo Unlimited) that has notably allowed to observe the effects of space weightlessness on wine, even when the latter are very great wines. Result: The Institute of Vine and Wine Sciences of the University of Bordeaux showed that Petrus had kept all its qualities despite its long stay in space! Blind tastings have allowed to detect slight nuances between a wine that remained on earth and another that would have gone to the ISS: in terms of color but also in terms of smell and taste. The previous record, set at $558,000 in October 2018 during a sale at Sotheby’s in New York by a bottle of Romanée-Conti, could therefore be largely beaten by this Pomerol Petrus 2000, estimated for itself at nearly one million dollars.
