Three bottles of perhaps the most famous and most travelled Scotch whisky are back to their icy home

First of all, serve youself a whisky dram and then, start to read this post. It could help to warm you up... Sláinte!!

In 2010, three crates of Scottish Mackinlay whisky, bottled in 1898 after being aged for 15 years, and two of brandy were discovered by conservationists beneath the floor boards of Antartic explorer Ernest Shackleton’s abandoned his 1907 Numrod expedition base camp hut. The expedition failed to reach the South Pole but set a record at the time for reaching the farthest southern latitude.

The crates were frozen solid after 102 years below the ice but the whisky itself was intact as the Antartica's -30 degrees Celsius was not cold enough to freeze the alcohol.

All of us would be tempted to open it and have a dram of it... but the actual owner of the brand decided differently.

In fact, Distiller Whyte & Mackay, which now owns the Mackinlay brand, chartered a private jet to take the bottles from the Antarctic operations headquarters in the New Zealand city of Christchurch to Scotland for analysis in 2011. Why? Because the recipe for the whisky had been lost…

The bottles were returned unopened to the distillers in order to be able to extract a sample with a syringe through the cork of one of the bottles: recreate the long-lost recipe. The Scottish Master Blender, Richard Paterson, has rigorously blended several malts to create a replica of this centenary whisky.

The Mackinlay replica contains a large variety of Highland malts, including Glen Mhor, who was the Mackinlay distillery before its closure in 1983. They could reproduce a limited edition of 50 000 bottles of the original beverage, costing around 169€ each and Antarctic Heritage Trust receiving £5 (5,90€) for every bottle sold.

To conclude, these three mystic whisky bottles were finally ceremoniously handed back on Saturday night at New Zealand's Scott Base. Nearly back sweet home…

Small consolation, we still have the opportunity to taste this legendary whisky and having our usual tasting notes. Waiting for that moment!