If a bottle of Petrus 2000 that Christie's is selling tastes out of this world it might be because it aged for 14 months aboard the International Space Station. 

Christie's hopes the bottle, now up for grabs in a private sale, will fetch $1 million, which would make it the most expensive wine ever sold.

The bottle is one of a batch of 12 that European startup Space Cargo Unlimited sent into orbit as part of research into how food and drink matures in space.

The wine spent almost 440 days in space, or the equivalent of 300 trips to the Moon, Space Cargo Unlimited Nicolas Gaume said in a press release.

It left for the ISS on November 2, 2019 in a spacecraft known as a Cygnus capsule and returned on January 14, 2021 aboard a Dragon capsule manufactured by Elon Musk's SpaceX.

At the end of a blind tasting, the researchers noted "remarkable differences in the colour, aroma and taste components," between the celestial bottles and equivalents which had remained on earth.

The sale is expected to smash the record price for a standard 750 ml bottle of wine. The most expensive was a 1945 Romanee-Conti Burgundy which sold at Sotheby's in New York for $558,000 in 2018.