Bordeaux (AFP)

Twelve bottles of wine and 320 vine shoots arrived in Bordeaux on Monday evening after spending fourteen and ten months respectively at the International Space Station (ISS) for a scientific experiment.

Returning on January 13 to land aboard the Dragon cargo ship of the private company SpaceX, the Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon vine shoots and the bottles were then transported to Bordeaux where they will be compared to batches that remained on the ground under the same conditions. conservation.

"The WISE mission is the first comprehensive private applied research program aimed at harnessing the space environment to meet the challenges of tomorrow's agriculture on a warmer Earth with less drinking water," told AFP Nicolas Gaume, co-founder with Emmanuel Etcheparre, of Space Cargo Unlimited, at the origin of the project.

In the ISS, the wine bottles were stored under the same conditions as on earth, except for gravity.

"When the Earth's environment is recreated in space as on the ISS, the only parameter that changes relative to the Earth is almost zero gravity. This exposes life on the ISS to immense stress," explains Nicolas Gaume.

"Our approach is that the various plant elements that we will expose to this spatial stressor will develop more resilience" to other stresses, such as those linked to climate change, underlines this enthusiast.

"What we are learning in the wine industry, we plan to develop it in other agricultural fields", he adds.

The cost of this operation carried out in partnership with the Institute of Vine and Wine Sciences of Bordeaux (ISVV), the University of Erlangen (Germany) and CNES has not been communicated.

"The team now has around fifteen researchers involved, including Pr Stéphanie Cluzet from ISVV in charge of our main experiment" and "Professor Michael Lebert from the cell biology department at FAU Erlangen University in Germany, a leading European specialists in research in space agriculture ", according to Nicolas Gaume.

A private wine tasting, whose name has not yet been revealed, is scheduled for the end of February in Bordeaux with oenologist and agronomist Franck Dubourdieu.

A bottle of wine had already been sent into space in 1985 but without scientific issue.

It was a small bottle of Lynch-Bages 1975, that the owner Jean-Michel Cazes had brought to the ex-astronaut Patrick Baudry who was boarding the Discovery shuttle in Houston.

"I did not have the ambition to contribute to a scientific experiment, but more simply to make people talk about Bordeaux wine", recognizes Jean-Michel Cazes who had "had a special label made" for the occasion.

The Lynch-Bages bottle has never been uncorked: it still sits on a shelf in the dining room at Les Cazes.

© 2021 AFP