Space-Safe Champagne Exists, So We Can Colonize Mars Now
There's a part of my brain that wanted to go all "Eat The Rich" on this story, but screw it, this is just too cool to harrumph. Cheers to Wine Spectator for bringing our attention to the work of champagne house G. H. Mumm, which has, with the help of design agency Spade, created the Mumm Grand Cordon Stellar. It's champagne you can open in space. They also designed glasses, so that you can drink the wine. In space.
Please, watch this video. You deserve it. If you want to bypass the very cool glass-blowing at get right to the space business, skip to 1:19.
Come on, that is fucking cool.
In zero-gravity environments, the bubbly takes the form of, well, bubbles—quivering, floating globules. "The bottle uses the champagne's gas to expel the liquid into a ring-shaped frame, where it is concentrated and evaporated into a droplet of bubbles," a Mumm rep explained to Unfiltered [a Wine Spectator column]. "[The droplets] can then be gathered up using glasses specially designed by Mumm."
Emphasis ours. The bottle, WS reports, will still open while earthbound, but the glasses probably won't work. But who cares if they won't work on earth. To drink the wine, you catch it like you're using a wiffle scoop. Oh, and they designed the glasses to make sure you could clink them together and the space champagne would stay in a big bubbly bubble in the bowl.
I repeat, you can toast and clink your glasses in space.
Here's where I got a little grumbly. Didier Mariotti, the Mumm cellar master and one of the people on that Zero-G flight, says on the video that there's an added creaminess to the wine that was new to him, and that the fruit flavors were "more elaborated," adding: "There's a sheer pleasure of the taste when tasting in weightlessness. We discover aspects that we didn't have on Earth."
But who cares, just look.
At.
That.
The bottle, which WS calls "very limited edition" (I'll bet it is, grumble-about-the-rich), will be released in September.
In the same piece, WS notes the country of Georgia is also thinking about wine in space. As its contribution to NASA's ongoing 'Journey to Mars Challenge'—a project asking "individuals and organizations to experiment with ways to make human life sustainable—and bearable—on the Red Planet"—Georgia has declared its intention to figure out how to make vineyards happen on Mars.
Researchers will attempt to grow grapevines in a greenhouse mimicking Mars conditions. For now, the focus is on identifying varieties best suited to Martian terroir, but we see no reason why the next phase of the project shouldn't involve fermenting wine in clay qvevri, in the ground... in space.
Space!