Wine made with a 4.5-billion-year-old meteorite (but does it taste out of this world?)

• The space rock crashed into a desert in Chile 6,000 years ago
• The wine doesn't carry an astronomical price - £7 a bottle
  

By Ted Thornhill
Updated: 13:33 EST, 8 February 2012

This is one variety of wine that’s likely to leave you feeling spaced out.

Meteorito has been made from cabernet sauvignon grapes and 4.5-billion-year-old meteorite - and represents a blending of two hobbies.

The maker is Norwich-born Ian Hutcheon, who runs a vineyard and astronomy centre in Chile called the Centro Astronomica Tagua Tagua.

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Heavenly: Meteorito wine costs £7 a bottle and is made from a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon and space rock

Corking fellow: Astronomer and wine-maker Ian Hutcheon with his unique beverage

The space rock measures three-inches long and was found in the Atacama Desert in Northern Chile, where it is believed to have crashed 6,000 years ago.

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A private collector from the U.S donated it to Mr Hutcheon, who makes the red wine by putting the meteorite in a wooden barrel with the grapes for 25 days.

Mr Hutcheon told MailOnline: ‘The idea behind the project was to blend my passion for both astronomy and enology in a real, physical way rather than just a symbolic one, and give everybody the chance to touch an element of space and taste particles of the birth of the solar system via a very good handcrafted wine. My observatory is just 10 kilometres [six miles] as the condor flies from our Tremonte vineyard.'

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Meteorito: The wine's label explains how it was made

Crop a load of that: Mr Hutcheon's vineyard in Chile

He added that one hurdle in making the wine was that 'the meteorite addition is quite aggressive'.

To combat this it has been filtered carefully 'in order to help it bring out
the flavours rather than damage the wine'.

Mr Hutcheon says that the wine is ‘livelier’ than the non-meteorite version.

It costs £7 a bottle, contains 14.5 per cent alcohol and so far 10,000 litres have been fermented.

Space-loving beer enthusiasts are out of luck by the looks of things.

However, Japan's Sapporo brewery did rustle up 250 six-packs of Space Barley in 2009.

It was made by researchers from the Russian Academy of Sciences, Okayama University and Russian space agency Roscosmos from grains that spent almost half a year in orbit on the International Space Station.

Cosmic: The meteor used in Mr Hutcheon's wine crashed into the Atacama Desert 6,000 years ago

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