Meteorito Wine
(images via: Newlaunches.com, The Drinks Business and Astronomy)
Expatriate Englishman Ian Hutcheon’s Tremonte Vineyard in Chile’s Cachapoal Valley produces a rather unique Cabernet Sauvignon called Meteorito. While imbibers might not taste it, the wine is aged along with a 4.5 billion-year-old meteorite resting at the bottom of the barrel. The three-inch-wide meteorite is on loan from an American collector but it’s believed to have local provenance as part of a strike into the Atacama Desert roughly 6,000 years ago.
(image via: CBC.ca)
“I’ve been involved in wines and astronomy for many, many years and I wanted to find some way of combining the two,” explained Hutcheon. “When you drink this wine, you are drinking elements from the birth of the solar system.” Around 10,000 litres of the meteor-aged wine have been made so far and if you’d like to knock back a glass or two, book time at Hutcheon’s Centro Astronomico Tagua Tagua observatory. You’ll be starry-eyed in no time.
Grayson Tighe Gibeon Meteorite Pens
(image via: Airline International)
The Grayson Tighe Gibeon Meteorite pen is a very limited edition of 18 fountain pens and 18 roller ball pens. The pens feature barrels made from the Gibeon Meteorite that fell in Namibia and are accented with Guilloché engraved Stainless Steel. While the roller ball pen offers ease of maintenance thanks to an advanced refill system that has a one-year cap-off time, it’s the fountain pen that really stands out: a Tighe nib handmade in Germany is highlighted with 18K yellow gold, engraved with a specially designed Acanthus leaf, tipped with Iridium (a metal rare on Earth but common in meteorites) and two-toned with Rhodium. No price is listed on the company website, you’ll have to call and ask in person.
Apophis USB Flash Drive
(image via: ZaNa Design)
The Apophis USB Flash Drive from ZaNa Design matches your mundane everyday data with a 4.5 billion year old chip off one of the solar system’s building blocks… those cute cat pics had better be keepers!
(images via: Sinbadesign and Google+/Mashable)
The Polish-based company named the drive after 99942 Apophis, the thousand-foot wide Earth-grazing asteroid recently thought to have a slight chance of impacting the Earth in 2029 or, if it should miss us, 2036. On the bright side, if Apophis DOES score a bullseye there’ll be plenty of meteoric material available and the price of ZaNa Design’s USB flash drives should drop accordingly.
(image via: ZaNa Design)
The 64GB Apophis USB Flash Drive features, in addition to the trimmed and polished chip of meteorite, a 0.04 carat diamond and your choice of .925 silver or 18-carat gold trim housed in a case made from rare, 200-year old African Blackwood. Pricing ranges from $1,130 for the silver-trimmed version up to $1,990 if you’re going for the gold.
(images via: Redditbot)
Some people are uncomfortable with the practice of “commercializing” meteorites, preferring they be preserved as-is and only displayed under glass in science museums. Here’s a newsflash: they already are and always have been, and as last week’s Russian meteor strike so loudly proved, more are arriving all the time. As long as a rough balance between demand by scientists and demand from the market is maintained, meteorite merchandise has a bright future – which is really saying something considering these original rock stars are billions of years old.

