Stellar Mumm: Space Tournament Champion

The skull stuck to the floor of the cabin, as if pressed by double gravity, we do not blink eyelash. Jean-François Clervoy, astronaut and president of Novespace, advised not to move to spare the cereal. In short, “living the craziest experience on Earth” as Octave de Gaulle sums up the incident requires prudence and a strong heart. The Zero G experience can be made possible by parabolic flights departing from Bordeaux organized by Novespace, a subsidiary of Cnes (next departure 1 March, 6,000 euros). After taking off, the specially configured Airbus A310 Zero G climbs almost vertically to 8000 meters, the pilots change course and descend simulating a free fall. It’s weightlessness, 22 seconds unforgettable. Of course, you swim in the padded cabin, like a slow – moving photo. The body does what it wants and can.

Octave, he keeps his straps on and holds the Mumm Stellar bottle securely which cost him three years of work. He presses the cork, activates something under the bottle. A fluffy ball of foam escapes, dragging dozens more behind it. In the cabin, they recreate a strange and short – lived solar system. With a strange acre in the shape of a golf house, Emilie Langleron grabs a white sphere and puts it in her mouth. Everything is going very fast, and yet, time seems to be running out: that’s what toasting in space is all about. Back to earth, the young oenologist from Mom is still enjoying the fireworks of aromas in the mouth: “3D burst of yellow fruit, apricot, pear.” Her palate is tried and tested: each harvest she tastes nearly 2,000 samples of still wines to blend the next cuvée. But she did not enjoy the 2014 harvest of this Mumm Grand Cordon Rouge High Altitude.

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This sparkling odyssey is the result of extreme ground contact. A young man – General de Gaulle’s great – great – granddaughter – who specializes in space design and his partner, Matthew Sindall, with a brand, Mumm, who has exploration as his password. In the large private house on rue du Champ-de-Mars in Reims, a photograph of Jean-Baptiste Charcot drinking a glass during his voyage to the Antarctic shows that the house is not shy. “Mom celebrates those who go downhill,” explains Quentin Meurisse, Director of Marketing. “But outside of marketing, he assures us, there is a market: space tourism is tomorrow. The SpaceX ships aboard the Japanese will no doubt want to take a nice bottle. Octave’s idea stems from this observation: after seventy years of space capture, the next civilian travelers have other needs and desires than the scientists or the army. And especially friendliness. As Jean-François Clervoy calculates: “When we spend 600 days on Mars, we need shared times.”

It took almost three years of research to develop a bottle of Mumm Grand Cordon Stellar champagne. “Gravity restriction creates others,” says physicist Gérard Liger-Belair, a bubble specialist in stretched liquids at Reims University. The restrictions are physicochemical but also – above all? – social: “Design is not just about solving technical problems,” says Octave de Gaulle. We had to think about the tasting rituals. ” So, during a lack of weight, one can not spill, because the liquid no longer adheres to the ground pull. You can inhale, and thirst the quenter astronauts with straws. But the nose does not participate in the tasting, which reduces the taste satisfaction. Then you can not meet, so share. The liquid can be removed from its container by capillary. But not this little “pop” that signals the celebration. But “it’s the capital of the cork that comes to light!”

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Mouth-blown, so the bottle has a piston that releases the neck opening when a trigger type is activated. This is located in the bottom of the bottle (Because the base, for service, is essential! ” appeals, the prize of mousse must be held in the cellar: fifteen months for the AOC, three years at Mumm, except for the semi – forms.In short, it was necessary to be able to go to the Moon. To make matters worse, the weightless cabin is still under pressure: so the liquid can escape at rocket speed. ”Five liters of carbon dioxide are dissolved in a bottle of champagne, which As soon as we uncork, the gas must come out, without weight, it curls into a ball and is coated in a liquid like a flake of white foam. the bottle of all the challenges the floating fields like the whiskey of the Cha ptaein Haddock in album Tintin. To pick them up delicately, thanks to the physical law of “surface tension”, Octave drew a kind of truncated whistle, in the shape of a golf tee. And now, cheers!

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