Guess What Space Item This Wine Was Aged With

Wine professionals describe Cabernet Sauvignon as having a black current aroma that can develop as it ages into richer bouquets of cedar, violet or leather. But here's a new note for the sommelier's recommending a specific bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon should learn: it may pair well with freeze-dried astronaut food and has a slight hint of meteorite. You heard right: meteorite.

According to Discovery News, an enterprising space enthusiast decided to experiment with a fermentation process using a space rock from an "American collector." It is the first time a meteorite has been used in the wine-making process.

Discovery News reports Ian Hutcheon, an Englishman who lives in Chile where he started his own observatory in 2007, creates "Meteorito" wine using a 3-inch wide meteorite estimated to be 4.5 billion years old and said to have landed on Earth 6,000 years ago. Hutcheon is reported as saying that the meteorite gives the wine a "livelier taste."

Discovery News describes that the meteorite was in an oak barrel for a year in a process called malolactic fermentation, which takes place after the wine's primary fermentation:

[Malolactic fermentation] is achieved by lactic acid bacteria, notably Oenococcus oeni. There are others, of course, but the Aroma Dictionary informs me that this bacteria in particular "typically processes substances that have pleasant and wine sympathetic aromas and flavors." And those flavors are imparted to the wine as it ages in a wooden barrel.

[...]

"When you drink this wine, you are drinking elements from the birth of the solar system," Hutchinson said, adding that he wanted "to give everybody the opportunity to touch something from space: the very history of the solar system, and feel it via a grand wine."

Independent Wine Review reports that 1,100 twelve bottle cases of “Meteorito” Cabernet Sauvignon have been made thus far, and they are only sold out of Hutcheon's observatory, Centro Astronomico Tagua Tagua.

[H/T Gizmodo]