Space age bottle of luxury Mann Champagne is made so wealthy tourists going into orbit can drink fizz in zero gravity
Maison Mumm, the iconic French champagne house founded in 1827, has ushered in a new era and unveiled Mumm Grand Cordon Stellar – a ground-breaking innovation which will allow astronauts and space tourists to enjoy the pleasures of champagne in zero-gravity.
Carbonated beverages don't fare well in space. But that hasn't deterred French bubbly maker Maison Mumm from figuring out how to serve champagne in microgravity, thanks to a specialised bottle and serving glass. It's called the Mumm Grand Cordon Stellar Project.
"The bubbles of carbon dioxide in carbonated beverages aren't buoyant in a weightless environment, so they remain randomly distributed throughout the fluid, even after swallowing," says NASA. "This means that carbonated beverages including soft drinks and beer may become a foamy mess during space travel." The space agency notes the bubbles go right through an astronaut's digestive system rather than being burped out.
Spade founder Octave de Gaulle, who has made a career in designing objects for use in space, says the most challenging aspect was simply getting the liquid out of the bottle.
The result of their research is a revolutionary bottle and glass concept which utilises the champagne’s gas to expel the liquid into a ring-shaped frame, where it’s concentrated into a droplet of bubbles and then passed to someone or released into the air to be gathered in a custom glass.
Drinkers capture this floating sphere of alcoholic foam in a distinct tapered glass, with its small five cm diameter cup holding onto the champagne via surface tension. When the foam enters the mouth, it transforms into a liquid and unleashes an intense, more rounded take on Mumm’s signature Grand Cordon. Granted, it’s not quite like champagne on earth, but it is the next best thing.
The champagne will be tested during an upcoming flight from Reims, in the heart of France's Champagne country, today.
A specially-equipped Airbus A300 Zero-G plane (sometimes nicknamed the 'Vomit Comet') will make a series of parabolic maneuvers, climbing steeply before plunging down to create 20-second bursts of weightlessness.
Despite undergoing the same zero-gravity training that Nasa requires for its astronauts – the champagne's target audience is not scientists, as they are not allowed to drink alcohol aboard the International Space Station.
Instead, the bottle is aimed at the forthcoming wave of suborbital and orbital space tourism promoted by private operators like Virgin Galactic and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin.