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Maxime Girardin descends from a long line of winemakers in France’s Burgundy region dating back at least 200 years.
So it caught his family off guard when he decided in 2021, then only 24, to break from tradition and try his hand at spirits instead. Even more unthinkable was what he wanted to do with his fledgling brand, Pegasus Distillerie: bottle space.
To be clear, Girardin didn’t intend to sell cases of empty bottles. He wanted to capture the essence of outer space and the stars, inspired by his love of the night sky, which began years earlier while volunteering in southern Africa. There he saw some of the clearest celestial views on Earth.
Because humans won’t be hanging their unhelmeted tongues out into the great vacuum of space anytime soon, Girardin calls his meteorite-infused liquor, Shooting Star Vodka, perhaps the next closest experience to tasting the cosmos.
“I’ll be honest with you, when we first started this, we didn’t know whether we were going to release it or not because we were like, ‘If it doesn’t add anything, then it’s pure marketing and communication, and that’s not really the point,'” Girardin told Mashable.
We asked several scientists to pontificate on the flavor profiles of meteorites, based on their knowledge of minerality and complex geological processes. These ancient relics of the solar system come in a variety of forms — amalgams of the Periodic Table, metamorphosed through chemical changes. It’s quite possible no two space rocks taste alike.
After suspending a meteorite in a terracotta jar filled with his company’s eponymous Pegasus Vodka for a year, the alcohol had acquired a hint of sweetness.
Credit: Pegasus Distillerie
The speculation ran amok, with descriptions to rival the world’s top sommeliers, like “musty,” “gritty,” or “I guess it depends on the concentration.” During a video interview, Maria Valdes, a cosmochemist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, understood the assignment and went so far as to lick a similar meteorite from her personal collection on camera — in the name of science, of course.
“I’m getting no obvious flavor notes from it,” she said, slightly sputtering afterward. “Dry, like clay-y, sort of.”
But when Girardin tasted his infused vodka, he was pleasantly surprised. After suspending a meteorite in a terracotta jar filled with his company’s eponymous Pegasus Vodka for a year, the alcohol had acquired a hint of sweetness. What caused the vodka, which is sugarless, to pick up that taste was a mystery, he said.
NASA estimates about 48.5 tons of billions-of-years-old meteor material rain down on Earth daily, but much of it vaporizes in the atmosphere or plunges into water, which covers over 70 percent of the planet.
People have discovered over 82,000 meteorites on Earth. The vast majority come from asteroids in the main belt, but a paucity, about 1 percent, hail from Mars or the moon, according to data collected by The Meteoritical Society. At least 385 specimens have originated from the Red Planet.
Though all space rocks on Earth are rare, the one in Girardin’s vodka is classified as an “ordinary chondrite,” the most common kind of stony meteorite, composed mostly of silicate minerals. Registered with The Meteoritical Society under the name Huntsman (b), the 22.5-pound rock was discovered near Huntsman, Nebraska, in 1977 — but it could have landed long before that: Someone found another meteorite that might have broken off the same parent rock just three miles northwest of it in 1910.
A close-up example of fusion crust formed on a chondrite.
Credit: abriendomundo / iStock / Getty Images Plus
On the outside, this rock is perhaps unremarkable. A dark brown lump with a patchy weathered fusion crust — the thin glassy layer formed as a meteor’s surface melts from searing air friction. But a cut of the meteorite reveals the veritable constellation within it: Igneous blobs and brilliant flecks of iron-nickel. Girardin bought his ingredient from an Arizona company that specializes in lab-testing meteorites.
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“It’s not just the rock that someone finds in their garden,” he joked, although technically, someone did find it on a farm.
Are meteorites safe to eat or drink?
Geologists say imbibing a drink steeped with an ordinary chondrite doesn’t pose any obvious health concerns. Even if the meteoroid were irradiated in space, every terrestrial rock — and, for that matter, person — is radioactive, said Randy Korotev, a retired lunar geochemist from Washington University in St. Louis. After all, we’re all made of atoms from star formation, he said. On average, more radiation is present in bananas due to their potassium than a meteorite, whose abundances of radioactive elements decay rather quickly.
“I suspect that an ordinary chondrite is far less lethal than other things found in vodka,” Korotev said.
And though meteorites do contain metals, ingesting trace amounts would be no different than eating Earth rocks, something humans are wont to do. Unintentionally, people consume small amounts of gravel from their vegetables or tiny grains of sand that blow onto their sandwiches at the beach all the time.
Charles Jones, a geology professor at the University of Pittsburgh, said dissolving Huntsman b into a food or beverage would be akin to dropping a fresh piece of Icelandic volcanic rock into it. That’s because the meteorite has essentially the same minerals but with a dash of iron-nickel metal. Given that the original analysts described Huntsman b as containing very little rust, Jones didn’t believe the rock would be at risk of leaching much iron.
“If you really want the vodka to taste like an old Buick, I’d go for a weathered piece of the Campo del Cielo meteorite from Argentina,” Jones said. “These pieces can be so rusty that they fall apart in your hands.”
A shiny piece of the Campo del Cielo meteorite from Argentina.
Credit: Bjoern Wylezich / iStock / Getty Images Plus
Girardin’s meteorite vodka was aged in an amphora, a traditional Italian clay pot, which is porous. The thinking was that oxygen passing through it would act as a binder between the vodka and the minerals dissolved from the meteorite, he said.
The results intrigued his father, world-renowned winemaker Vincent Girardin, who wondered whether he could detect the minerality from their water, sourced from a spring-fed well that reaches about 500 feet below ground in Meursault, Burgundy. But it wasn’t just something in the water. When the winemaker sipped from a glass of the regular vodka compared to the one tinged with the meteorite, he noticed a difference between the two.
“Somehow it wakes up some special area on your tongue. It plays on your tongue for minutes and minutes,” the distiller Girardin said. “It’s really not just the taste. How it feels in the mouth is an experience of its own.”
Pegasus Distillerie uses water sourced from a spring-fed well that reaches about 500 feet below ground in Meursault, Burgundy.
Credit: Hans Strand / Corbis Documentary via Getty Images
Organic material found in meteorites
A few years before Girardin submerged a meteorite in his vodka, Valdes’ colleague, Field Museum curator Philipp Heck, and a team of scientists soaked a very similar meteorite, dubbed Hamburg, in ethanol, too — but for research purposes. The meteorite was one eyewitnesses had seen as a fireball streaking across the sky over Michigan in 2018. After the rock landed, thrilled scientists of various expertise ran every possible test imaginable on the specimen.
What they found blew them away: They had extracted thousands of organic compounds in the ethanol residue, from a rock no one would have expected to have many organics. Because of this, Valdes suspects Huntsman b also released some soluble carbons and hydrocarbons into the vodka, “reflecting the history of the parent body from which the meteorite came,” she said.
But a carbonaceous chondrite might offer even more unique organic compounds for the infused booze enthusiast.
“Exciting flavors might come from the dozens of exotic space amino acids that are not otherwise found on Earth, or from the polycyclic hydrocarbons, or from the sulfur,” Jones said.
A carbonaceous chondrite is a stony meteorite that contains hydrocarbons, amino acids, and other material associated with life.
Credit: Ludovic Debono / iStock / Getty Images Plus
If given a choice of space rock to sample, Valdes said she’d want to try a Martian meteorite, to discover what flavors its rich aqueous history — the ancient rivers and lakes that ran through it, once upon a time — would impart. Alan Rubin, a California-based geologist who teaches at UCLA, would select a practical meteorite off the menu: a non-metallic achondrite, he said, to avoid any remote chance of gut cuts.
“I generally find the meteorites too interesting to eat them,” Rubin said. “Since I’m curator of the UCLA meteorite collection, it’s sort of my responsibility to preserve their meteorites and not use them for lunch.”
Pegasus Distillerie, founded by Maxime Girardin, is a maker of spirits named after the Pegasus constellation.
Credit: Universal History Archive / Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Pegasus Distillerie made its U.S. debut in April, with bottles of its vodkas, gin, and liqueur, including the small batch of Shooting Star Vodka, on shelves in New York, Florida, and California. The company will begin selling bottles direct to consumers nationwide from its website on June 12. The meteorite vodka costs $180 to $200 a bottle, of which there are only 4,806 in this run.
They intend to reuse their chunk of meteorite, which they have not cut or ground up, to make future batches.
“We don’t throw it away. It’s traveled through deep space for thousands and millions of years. It’d be a shame to break it,” Girardin said. “It has survived entering the atmosphere, so we should let it live as it is for now.”
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