‘Moonwalker’ wine inspired by Apollo missions launches

A Cabernet inspired by Apollo moon missions boasting a label signed by three of the five living US astronauts who walked on the moon has gone on sale.

Moonwalker 2015 Cabernet Sauvignon is the fruit of a collaboration between boutique winery Holman Cellars in the Napa Valley and the Cosmosphere space museum in Kansas.

A portion of the profits from the wine will be donated to the Cosmosphere, which, in addition to being a museum, is a science education centre.

Those keen to get their hands on a piece of space history will have to be quick, as bottles are being offered on a first come first served basis with 75cl bottles limited to three per person and magnums restricted to one per person.

Astronaut Charlie Duke was the 10th and youngest person to walk on the moon in 1972 during the Apollo 16 mission

The white label features the phases of the moon in silver alongside the signatures of Alan Bean, Charlie Duke and Harrison Schmitt – three of the five living US astronauts who walked on the moon.

Diehard fans can pay more for bottles personally autographed by the trio, while bottles featuring labels with their printed signatures have also gone on sale.

Those who splash out on Jeroboams (3L), imperials (6L) and Salmanazars (9L) will have bragging rights as the larger format bottles boast engraved signatures of the astronauts.

Prices range from US$120 for a 75cl bottle to US$1,490 for the Salmanazar, which has already sold out, as have all of the hand-signed magnums.

The news is timely, as last night an incredibly rare ‘super blue blood moon’ could be seen glowing in the sky around the world.

Its perfectly round shape and pale orange hue made it look like a giant peach.

The rate sight happens when a lunar eclipse, a blood moon and a super moon coincide. A blue moon occurs when a full moon happens twice in a month.

The Mars-like red glow of a ‘blood moon’ is produced by sunlight skimming through the earth’s atmosphere on its way to the moon, which gets refracted, filtering the blue light out leaving the red light visible.

This isn’t the first cosmic wine to have gone on sale. Back in 2012 Ian Hutcheon, an Englishman working in Chile, launched the world’s first wine aged with a meteorite formed during the birth of the solar system.

Called Meteorito, the Cabernet from Cachapoal was aged with a 4.5 billion-year-old meteorite from the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter.