Meteorito Wine Is Out of This World, Literally

Flickr/Southern Foodways Alliance

a glass of Cab

Sure, that nice vintage Cabernet Sauvignon you have sitting in your wine cellar may have notes of dark chocolate and hints of sweet cherries, but does it really taste out of this world? No? Well then, you may want to head to Chile for the Meteorito, a red wine that is infused with the potentially tinny taste of a meteorite.

According to The Drinks Business, Meteorito creator Ian Hutcheon is both an amateur astronomer who owns his own observatory and a dedicated oenophile who owns his own vineyard in a former gold mine in Chile. As people who have both an observatory and a vineyard are wont to do, he decided to put a little bit of cosmo in his vino.

"The idea behind submerging [a meteorite] in wine was to give everybody the opportunity to touch something from space, the very history of the solar system, and feel it via a grand wine," he says to The Drinks Business. And so, he borrowed the three-inch rock from an "American collector" and tossed it in a barrel full of Cabernet Sauvignon grapes as it fermented for 12 months.

The meteorite traveled a long way to end up at the bottom of the wine barrel: it likely spun out of the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter and landed in Chile's Atacama Desert some 6,000 years ago. The space rock itself is estimated to be 4.5 billion years old, and, as are most meteorites that land on Earth, almost as old as the Solar System itself.

The meteorite, Hutcheon says in the same article, lends the wine a "livelier taste" that apparently only outer space could provide. About 10,000 liters of Meteorito have been made, and bottles are available only at Hutcheon's observatory. He is, however, "keen to export it to other countries." If the wine takes off, anyway.