For me, the pandemic has been all about fear, food and boxed wine. I don’t know why, but it seems that I’m not the only one out there struggling with the Pandemic 15 brought on by hunkering down while eating and drinking yourself into oblivion. And yes, I will admit that this bottle wine drinker has slipped into the old, dangerous habit of sipping boxed wine. You know what’s great about boxed wine? You’re never quite sure how much you’ve had.

But now, I see, I might have to return to my bottled wine days because of the article I just read. And, no, I’m not making this up.

It appears that one of the astronauts might have a drinking problem because of the latest idea by a bunch of fancy French Bordeaux Heads. They got together over what I would assume was a very good bottle or two of French wine and decided they wanted to know if wine that was sent to space for a year would age any differently then the wine that was still earth bound in their vast cellars. Sacre Bleu!

Personally, my palate can’t taste much difference in one brand of boxed wine or another. But back to the story:

I guess somebody knew somebody (or was bribed with some darn good wine) and they finagled a few $5,000 bottles of wine plus a bunch of grapevines on the SpaceX Dragon capsule headed for the International Space Station where the items would stay for a year. They must have sent extra for the crew because no one I know could just hangout with a bunch of $5,000 bottles of wine and not pop a cork or two.

Well, it’s been over a year and the wine and vines have returned to the fancy French Bordeaux Heads. And of course, they did what any ritzy wine types would – they had a wine tasting to compare the spacey bottles with the ones that had just laid around in the cellar.

Now before I give you the exact quote of their palate assessment, remember wine connoisseurs can taste all sorts of things that nobody else can – I just taste wine and it tastes pretty darn good to me.

12 of these pros did a blind sample (I’m blind after a couple of glasses, too) tasting the space-traveled wines and the cellar wines.

Here was the evaluation from the experts, “The Space Wine tastes like rose petals, smells like a campfire and glistens with a burnt-orange hue.” Well now, let’s see. There aren’t any roses in space, so sounds like to me some female astronaut was wearing a bit too much perfume up there on the Space Station. And smells like a campfire? Is that a good thing? Maybe it just reminded them of the delicate flavors of S’mores. And it’s an orange wine? My Very Best Friend hates the color orange (I know, she needs counseling) and she’s a big wine drinker so I think I need to tell her to steer clear of Space Wine.

What I think I’ll do is get ahold of one of the boxed wine companies and tell them to send some boxes up to space. Then they can claim they have Space in a Box Wine and raise their prices. No wait, I don’t want them to raise their prices.

I’ll end on a positive note about this odd experiment. After the tasting, the fancy French Bordeaux Heads Head (the guy in charge) was heard to exclaim, “I have tears in my eyes!” I can only guess that was because of the delicate aromas of the campfire.