French wines head home after year in space for out-of-this-world tasting in Bordeaux

The SpaceX Cargo Dragon.Picture: NASA

The International Space Station bid adieu on Tuesday to 12 bottles of French Bordeaux wine and hundreds of snippets of grapevines that spent a year orbiting the world in the name of science.

SpaceX’s Dragon cargo capsule undocked with the wine and vines – and thousands of pounds of other gear and research, including mice – and aimed for a splashdown on Wednesday night in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Tampa.