Space aging wine? NASA

https://twitter.com/BillGriffeth/status/1191458221652955140?ref_src=twsrc^google|twcamp^news|twgr^tweet

fun idea

I would only send 6 back…write it off as relativity effect, or some such.

A year? That seems a little light on the aging process.

Maybe cellars will become a thing of the past and our children will create “space cellars” to hold the wine at its peak forever?

How long does the board recommend they let the wine sit after the return trip to ensure no bottle shock?

That is the ultimate travel shock test!

Hopefully it’s a case of a single wine, and they have a control case back on planet earth stored at the same temp/humidity. Otherwise between those variables and cork variability any differences may lack meaning.

They have a control case of the same Bordeaux to compare. But, it sounds like most of the bottles will be sold along with other items that have flown to generate the money to fund the research. I’m guessing that’s “research” rather than research, but I may be biased.

-Al

Will tariffs be imposed upon return?

What protocol would Francois perform on space-aged wines?

I cannot see how they could have involved anyone actually credible in the aging of wines in designing the experiment like this. For most of us, of course, the right answer is to accelerate the person through space, returning having subjectively aged only a year while their recently acquired wines are now approaching peak !

He originally performed this type of test with one of these…

It was done with Thomas Jefferson wines and was indescribably delicious.

He then had his pal Ben Franklin lift a bottle up with a kite during an electrical storm and it was struck by lightning…he stated it caused bottle shock.

It would seem to me that we would have to have a solid scientific base of understanding about the aging process on earth for a study of aging in space to have any scientific value. And we don’t.

Yes, as far as I can tell, it’s a start-up trying to develop a market for items flown in space, not a science experiment.

-Al

It would be cool to find a way to let all that cosmic radiation bombard a bottle for that time in space and see what happens.

Presumably the bottle will be inside the station, which is fairly well protected (though still subject to more than here on earth). Given that whatever processes are happening during “good” aging aren’t driven by cosmic rays, it seems unlikely that whatever additional is going to happen in space will be a positive, but who knows. The “label bias” for drinking a wine having flown in space must be tremendous

On a side note, I hope the folks involved in climate policy start making noise about these kinds of unnecessary space excursions. Launching a space vehicle takes a tremendous amount of energy, which ultimately translates into a tremendous amount of CO2 production, one way or the other.

I have a friend who has a friend who runs bottles of wine through the MRI machines, CT machines, and Radiation Therapy machines in the facility where he works. (He used to put bottles in their now defunct nuclear accelerator just for grins.) He says it ‘instantly’ imparts the benefits of fine aging on the wines he subjects to his process…but then the bastard won’t let other people try his work to see! So, I can’t tell you if he is FOS, or not…I suspect he is.

Anywho, I’m more interested in what would happen, not whether it would necessarily be “better.”

On the MRI, he’s FOS, that I can assure you. CT or radiation therapy can cause real chemical changes, so it wouldn’t surprise me to find “something” - though both (particularly CT) are intended to deliver low doses of radiation. In any case, there is no way they are experiencing anything like “normal aging”.

What if it’s better than normal aging?

We could start a niche.

S & M Wine.

Here’s another suggestion: wrap each bottle with expensive speaker cable, and play different kinds of music around them. I’ll bet that does wonders!

I do know that mere proximity to yellow paint causes “yellow paint taint.”

Do you recall the magnetic collar that someone used to sell to put on the neck of your wine bottle to ‘treat’ the wine as you poured it?

That was a good one.