In the realm of expensive bottles of booze, there have been some doozies. A 1945 Domaine de la Romanée-Conti fetched $558,000 at auction in 2018. Someone paid $1.9 million for a 60-year-old bottle of Macallan Fine and Rare the very next year. And who knows how much an even older bottle of Old Ingledew Whiskey that's due to be auctioned off in June will go for. But there's one bottle being offered by the auction house Christie's that's got something on all of them: It's been to space.
A case of 21-year-old Château Pétrus from France's Bordeaux region spent more than a year aboard the International Space Station. Christie's, which notes that this is the first time a bottle of wine that has gone to space is being sold, is listing its estimated worth at $1 million. "This bottle of Pétrus 2000 marks a momentous step in the pursuit of developing and gaining a greater understanding of the maturation of wine," Tim Triptree, the international director of Christie’s wine and spirits department, said in a statement in early May.
A handful of wine connoisseurs had the opportunity to taste a bottle of the "space-aged" wine earlier this year, alongside a bottle of the same vintage that had not been sent to Earth orbit. One taster, Decanter's Jane Anson, said: "From previous experience of this wine, this particular bottle seems more evolved than I would expect from a 21-year-old bottle of Pétrus 2000. It is beautiful and nuanced, with fine tannins and a sense of energy, but has a clear difference in expression from the [Earth] wine."
The buyer will receive the wine along with a second bottle of Earth-bound Pétrus 2000, a decanter, glasses, and a corkscrew made from a meteorite — all in a custom-made trunk.
Wondering what other consumables could possibly command this kind of money?