A whisky worth exploring !

Larry Olmsted - 

Okay that’s a pun: this particular whisky traces its lineage to famed explorer Sir Ernest Henry Shackelton.

You see, Shackelton, famous for piloting the Endurance through one of the most horrific winter camping experiences in human history, didn’t just like exploring – he also liked his whisky. So he had three crates of Mackinlay’s with him when he reached Antarctica, which were abandoned or lost when things went bad and his ship got crushed in the icepack.

They sat undisturbed in the frigid climate for a century, before being found by the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Fund. Like the champagne bottles found in sunken shipwrecks and auctioned for ludicrous sums, these bottles were highly rare and desirable – to say the least.

The thing is they don’t make this Mackinlay’s anymore. Or rather they didn’t. While the whisky sat on ice, Mackinlay’s was acquired by Whyte & Mackay, who continue to make a more recent blended Scotch whisky under the name.

A laboratory analysis of the stuff in the crates allowed them to determine that it had been distilled in 1897 and bottled especially for Shackelton’s expedition. At this point, they decided to recreate it, and charged Whyte & Mackay Master Blender Richard Paterson with the task.

He made a show of flying to New Zealand to retrieve a single bottle, handcuffing it in a case to his wrist. Patterson and his team then tasted and sniffed, and tasted and sniffed and tested, before determining that it was made with malted peat from the Orkney Islands and aged in American white oak sherry casks, and lots of other stuff.

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