I HEART CHAOS

Wine snobs love to throw around heady adjectives in their description of their favorite wines– bouquet of rose and cinnamon with an afternote of thyme blah blah blah– but if you were drinking a glass of Meteorite, you might notice that it tastes a little like… outer space. Because Meteorite is the only wine that’s aged with a meteorite in the barrel.

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.”

What would possess a man to make wine with meteorites? For Hutchinson, it’s a natural dovetailing of interests. He owns a local vineyard in Chile’s Cachapoal Valley, and has a longstanding interest in astronomy.

He even launched his own observatory in 2007, the Centro Astrononomica Tagua Tagua, currently the only place you can buy Meteorito wine – at least for now. Hutchinson hopes to export the product around the world in the near future.

The meteorite in question, Hutchinson claims, is roughly three inches in diameter, 4.5 billion years old, and likely hails from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. It crashed in Chile’s Atacama Desert some 6,000 year ago.

Technically the meteorite belongs to “an American collector,” who didn’t seem to mind having his priceless piece of space rock marinate in a wooden barrel of red wine for 12 months.

That’s how long it took to complete something called “malolactic fermentation”: it’s a process that takes place after the primary fermentation. The first stage of the wine-making process – after harvesting the grapes, that is, which in this case come from Hutchinson’s Tremonte Vineyard southwest of Santiago – converts grape sugar into alcohol via yeast. This takes around 25 days.

The next stage, malolactic fermentation, is achieved by lactic acid bacteria, notably Oenococcus oeni. There are others, of course, but the Aroma Dictionary informs me that this bacteria in particular “typically processes substances that have pleasant and wine sympathetic aromas and flavors.” And those flavors are imparted to the wine as it ages in a wooden barrel.

Via