Explorer’s rare Scotch returned to stash

SCOTTBASE, Antarctica – Talk about whisky on ice: Three bottles of rare, 19th-century Scotch found beneath the floorboards of Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackelton’s abandoned expedition base were returned to the polar continent Saturday after a distiller flew them to Scotland to re-create the long-lost recipe.

But not even New Zealand Prime Minister John Key, who personally returned the stash, got a taste of the contents of the bottles of Mackinlay’s whisky, which were rediscovered 102 years after the explorer was forced to leave them behind.

“I think we’re all tempted to crack it open and have a little drink ourselves now,” Key joked at a ceremony handing over the bottles to Antarctic Heritage Trust officials at New Zealand’s Antarctic base on Ross Island.

The whisky will be transferred by March from Ross Island to Shackelton’s desolate hut at Cape Royds and replaced beneath the restored hut as part of a program to protect the legacy of the so-called heroic era of Antarctic exploration from 1898 to 1915.

Bottled in 1898 after the blend was aged 15 years, the Mackinlay bottles were among three crates of Scotch and two of brandy buried beneath a basic hut Shackleton had used during his dramatic 1907 Nimrod excursion to the Antarctic.

Distiller Whyte & Mackay, which now owns the Mackinlay brand, re-created a limited edition of 50,000 bottles from a sample drawn with a syringe through a cork of one of the bottles. The conservation work of the Antarctic Heritage Trust has received 5 British pounds for every bottle sold.