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Space Wine Science Idle

Forget Space Beer, Order Meteorite Wine Instead 77

astroengine writes "Chances are, when you pop open a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon, you expect to savor certain aromatic flavors, or 'notes,' depending on the wine: fruit forward, perhaps, with hints of pepper and leathery tannins, and just the faintest whiff of... meteorite??? At least that's what you'd savor if you were drinking a bottle of Meteorite, possibly the very first wine on the market aged with a meteorite that fell to Earth from space. It's the brainchild of Ian Hutcheon, an Englishman now working in Chile, who thinks the infusion of a bit of meteorite gives his wine a 'livelier taste.'"
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Forget Space Beer, Order Meteorite Wine Instead

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  • by Cryacin ( 657549 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2012 @03:55PM (#38729416)
    To get stoned.
  • by MrHanky ( 141717 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2012 @03:58PM (#38729464) Homepage Journal

    Hell of a slogan to introduce the coming zombie apocalypse.

  • by tverbeek ( 457094 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2012 @03:58PM (#38729468) Homepage

    It's official: oenology has veered off into gimmicky homeopathy.

    • by gazbo ( 517111 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2012 @04:25PM (#38729896)
      Then I suggest you dont' (do) read this: http://www.amicistours.com/wineswirling.html [amicistours.com]
    • by demonbug ( 309515 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2012 @04:51PM (#38730322) Journal

      It's official: oenology has veered off into gimmicky homeopathy.

      Enology has always been gimmicky homeopathy; it's only fairly recently (last 40-50 years out of a history >2000 years long) that it has been anything but gimmicky homeopathy.

      That said, It would be nice if they mentioned what kind of meteorite it is. I mean, I can see a nice iron-nickel meteorite bringing out the grapes' natural terroir of the clean, arid Chilean hills where they grow in the shadow (??) of the great Atacama desert. The complex and subtle mineral flavors imbued by a chondritic meteorite would obviously clash with the natural simplicity of the South American wine, and would be more appropriate for something grown in Napa or Bordeaux (no critique is complete without some form of inter-continental snobbery).

      Personally I'd grind up the meteorite and scatter it across the field so I could make up some even better BS about the alien notes introduced by the extra-terrestrial terroir (I like terroir) of the meteorite-imbued (imbue is good, too) soil. I could also produce way more meteorite wine that way than how they are doing it. Amateurs.

      • I mean, I can see a nice iron-nickel meteorite bringing out the grapes' natural terroir of the clean, arid Chilean hills where they grow in the shadow (??) of the great Atacama desert. The complex and subtle mineral flavors imbued by a chondritic meteorite would obviously clash with the natural simplicity of the South American wine, and would be more appropriate for something grown in Napa or Bordeaux (no critique is complete without some form of inter-continental snobbery).

        I disagree. I think it depends o

  • by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2012 @04:00PM (#38729494)

    Seriously, when the Zombie Apocalypse starts it will be exactly through doing something like putting alien soil into a beverage...

    • by Lashat ( 1041424 )

      Or..

      It will give the drinkers immunity to the bites.

      • by Ukab the Great ( 87152 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2012 @04:17PM (#38729744)

        Or maybe not, but we'll finally answer the age-old question of whether human brain goes better with a red or a white whine.

        • by jd2112 ( 1535857 )

          Or maybe not, but we'll finally answer the age-old question of whether human brain goes better with a red or a white whine.

          Judging by the lack of intelligence or taste of zombies I would guess a cheap mass-marketed beer. On the other hand, Livers, as we know, are best pared with fava beans and a nice chianti.

        • by gmhowell ( 26755 )

          I have it on good authority that long pork goes well with fava beans and a nice chianti.

        • by treeves ( 963993 )

          Well, since the liver goes well with a nice chianti, it would be fair to try a riesling or sauvignon blanc with brains.

  • by ticker47 ( 954580 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2012 @04:00PM (#38729502)
    I think I'll pass....we all know what happened to Cave Johnson.
  • by Ukab the Great ( 87152 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2012 @04:01PM (#38729506)

    Sweetest of the transition metals.

  • by hagrin ( 896731 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2012 @04:02PM (#38729522) Homepage Journal
    I'll stick to my pan galactic gargle blasters thank you very much.
    • by Abreu ( 173023 )

      I love those too, but getting Algolian sun-tiger teeth here on earth is getting really hard... Who's your supplier?

  • by EliSowash ( 2532508 ) <eli@nOspAM.sowash.net> on Tuesday January 17, 2012 @04:03PM (#38729542)
    What sort of cheese would one pair with a meteorite? I'm thinking a nice cheddar [bbc.co.uk]
  • by Anonymous Coward

    this is brought to you by the same group of people that believe coffee beans taste better after they pass through a cat

    • by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2012 @04:54PM (#38730390)

      Come on now, feline backdoor coffee is LITERALLY the shit when it comes to dealing with Space Wine induced hangovers.

    • by MrHanky ( 141717 )

      Cats? Yuck! I was told they used a weasel.

      • by tragedy ( 27079 )

        They use a meerkat (and possibly other animals), which is in the mongoose family. The theory is, I think, supposed to be that the meerkats will find and eat the best beans, therefore you get the best beans out of the other end. In practice... well I don't drink coffee anyway, what do I care?

    • by mortonda ( 5175 )

      I saw a documentary on coffee making, where they mentioned this... it wasn't a cat, but several types of animals were mentioned. They did a blind taste test with a bunch of professional coffee testers (called Cupping [wikipedia.org] ) and the result? The pooped coffee was indistinguishable from the worst samples of "normal" coffee. Certainly worse than the good varieties.

    • this is brought to you by the same group of people that believe coffee beans taste better after they pass through a cat

      Yes, well, that product was doomed because supply always falls behind demand when it comes to post feline digestive tract coffee beans. Meteorites are inanimate, and a pleasure to work with comparatively; Whereas, no one is brave or foolish enough to suffer a caffeinated cat twice.

  • by jfengel ( 409917 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2012 @04:06PM (#38729590) Homepage Journal

    It's a rock. You dumped a rock into your wine.

    Thank you for the description of malolactic fermentation. In fact, a nice article devoted to the details of malo would be very informative: the challenges, the kinds of flavors it produces, how it's controlled, etc. That would be great.

    I guess if what you're starting with is "some attention whore dumped a rock in his wine, and it's a SPACE ROCK" a science reporter has to do something for a second sentence. So, thanks for accidentally including some value in an otherwise pointless bit of attention whoring.

    • and it's a SPACE ROCK

      Technically, all the rocks (as well as everything else) on Earth came from space. Some have just been here longer than others.

      • in fact, from some perspectives , earth IS a space rock. Just throw some dirt in it and jack up the price.

        • by eyenot ( 102141 )

          Well, from the grandest possible perspective, *everything* is space *everything* because it's all surrounded by oUtEr SpAcE, right? So *my* wine is SPACEWINE just because I *made* it! I even piss in it, because my urine used to be part of a Staaarrrr

      • by Anonymous Coward

        Yeah, well, try explaining that to a Space Nutter. You'll need that bottle of wine.

    • by jd ( 1658 )

      Wired had an excellent article on how to extract brewing yeast from 45 million year old amber, some time back. Unfortunately, it's beer yeast and not wine yeast, but there should be some way to improve the alcohol tolerance.

    • "It's a space peanut..." - Joe Dirt
  • I knew my day would come... http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107563/ [imdb.com]

  • by Anonymous Coward

    As George Carlin once said, "if you nail together two things that have never been nailed together before, some schmuck will buy it."

  • Vintage 4,000,000,000 BCE (before common era).

  • Seriously...STFU. It's a gimmick and nothing more. I have been a brewer for a long time and this is just a simple novalty item. Say what it is and not something stupid like "It gives it a livelier taste!" Idiot.
  • Livlier? (Score:4, Funny)

    by bradorsomething ( 527297 ) on Tuesday January 17, 2012 @04:53PM (#38730364)
    ...don't you mean it tastes a little... meteor?
  • what other type of "stones" they may be experimenting with... *shutters*
  • It's submitted stories like this that make me yearn to get to the comments. You know: start off with a few jokes... get into the XKCD shit... ALL ROCKS come from space...

    [deep contented sigh] Like watching a train wreck all over again...

  • Reminds me of a Russian folk tale where a guy convinces a stingy woman to give him all the soup ingredients by telling her that a woodsmen axe is an integral part of the recipy.

  • Meteorites are usually 10-20 percent very high purity nickel, a few points of other alloying metals, the rest very high purity iron. Nickel is not likely to impart any flavor, as it resists corrosion by acids. The iron will likely be passivated on its surface or etch a little due to the lactic acid, which will release iron oxides into the wine. I'd say the metallic taste of Fe3 would be kinda nasty.
  • I see plenty of people made jokes about this piece of news. And it's okay: I'm fond of awful puns myself.

    Before going to the point, I'll just mention there's an Alsacian brewery called Meteor.

    My point is about microgravity, and how it could affect brewing and winemaking. But since, despite being French, I don't know much about winemaking, I'll stick to brewing (a matter in which I've been taught by distinguished Belgian amateurs).

    As any beer amateur knows, most beers basically fall into two categories, comm

  • I'll bet the price is astronomical.
  • She's got drops of Jupiter in her hair hey, hey, hey, hey.

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