Making Wine In Space Is Possible, NASA Says

A NASA official confirmed that making wine in space is a realistic possibility, according to Gizmodo Monday.

In 2014, NASA introduced a vegetable production system known as “Veggie.” Veggie was introduced as the first food production system to make fresh food for astronauts on the International Space Station (ISS). Researchers in Veggie developed ways to grow fresh food in close quarters. In the past few years, NASA astronauts have eaten crops grown in space such as lettuce and cabbage. Veggie experts said that with the right technology, making wine in space might be possible.

Read: Space Farming: NASA Tests New Harvest Technique To Increase ISS Crop Yield

“Wine grapes would be an interesting challenge,” Gioia Massa, Veggie principal investigator said to Gizmodo. “We have been working with some dwarf fruit trees that the USDA developed, and I have heard that they also have some dwarf grapevines, so if the plants were small enough or could be trained around, for example, lights, it would certainly be possible to grow them.”

Astronauts announced that in 2018 they will try to pollinate dwarf tomatoes on the ISS. A similar system could be used to pollinate grapevines. Massa said the most important things to consider with grapevines are their size and how they grow.

“Getting light to a sprawling vine is definitely a challenge. You would want very compact varieties,” she said. According to Massa, fermentation would be possible if the process of winemaking included inoculation with the right types of microorganisms.

“If you can grow or acquire wine grapes, you can make wine anywhere. We made some in our apartment last year with grapes we bought somewhere upstate just for fun,” Amy Ovecka, a sommelier at Lelabar in New York City, said to Gizmodo. “It was pretty terrible wine, but it was still technically wine, and I got to watch the actual process as a microcosm which was cool.”

This is not the first time wine in space has been addressed. In fall 2016, China decided to observe how cabernet sauvignon, merlot and pinot noir vines reacted to being in space. No conclusive results have been revealed yet.

Chris Gerling, an enology extension associate at Cornell University, confirmed that growing grapevines in space could be beneficial because there would be no exposure to bugs such as phylloxera, a louse that eats roots of grapes and almost wiped out France’s wine industry mid-19th century.

Read: National Wine Day 2017: 10 Best Bottles To Enjoy At Any Budget

In an email to Food & Wine, a NASA spokesperson said that making wine in space is not a priority.

“To clarify, NASA is not working on enabling making wine in space, but in producing fresh vegetables for astronauts’ nourishment on long duration during spaceflights. The plan is eventually to grow tomatoes and perhaps peppers and cucumbers — but not grapes.”