Unearthing Shackleton's Whisky

by Deidre Woollard (RSS feed)
Nov 7th 2009 at 11:01AM

Old whisky can be found in some pretty amazing places. I've heard of it stashed in the walls of houses, buried under ground, and discovered in shipwrecks under the ocean. But the trove left by Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton might be the most unusual. Shackelton and his crew left two cases of Scotch whisky stashed under the floorboard of a small wooden shack at Cape Royds.

The whisky was discovered by conservators in January 2006. They were unable to get the crates out but will be trying again in January during the Antarctic summer. It's not known what shape the bottles of Charles Mackinlay & Co. whisky will be in after one hundred years of freeze and thaw. The crates and bottles will remain in Antarctica unless they need to be taken off the continent for conservation reasons.

Richard Paterson, master blender at Whyte & Mackay, the company that now owns the Mackinlay label, would like to be able to taste the whisky. He has a 1907 letter from Shackleton along with a photograph of the bottles' label. He tells the Global Post he would like to extract some by sticking a needle through the cork and taking out liquid with a syringe. If the corks remained intact the whisky could taste much like it did in Shackleton's day but if the corks were dislodged and oxygen got in the taste may have been compromised. If a bottle were to make it out of Antarctica and onto the open market it could fetch over $1,000 a bottle not as much for the taste but for the provenance.

Tags: antarctica, sir ernest shackleton, SirErnestShackleton, whisky