While checking what passes for news these days (from any main-stream venue) I ran across this little blurb on Fox News Online…
WELLINGTON, New Zealand — A beverage company has asked a team to drill through Antarctica’s ice for a lost cache of some vintage Scotch whiskey that has been on the rocks since a century ago.
The drillers will be trying to reach two crates of McKinlay and Co. whiskey that were shipped to the Antarctic by British polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton as part of his abandoned 1909 expedition.
Whyte & Mackay, the drinks group that now owns McKinlay and Co., has asked for a sample of the 100-year-old scotch for a series of tests that could decide whether to relaunch the now-defunct Scotch.
Workers from New Zealand’s Antarctic Heritage Trust will use special drills to reach the crates, frozen in Antarctic ice under the Nimrod Expedition hut near Cape Royds.
Al Fastier, who will lead the expedition in January, said restoration workers found the crates of whiskey under the hut’s floorboards in 2006. At the time, the crates and bottles were too deeply embedded in ice to be dislodged.
The New Zealanders have agreed to try to retrieve some bottles, although the rest must stay under conservation guidelines agreed by 12 Antarctic Treaty nations.
–> Fastier said he did not want to sample the contents. <–
“It’s better to imagine it than to taste it,” he said. “That way it keeps its mystery.”
(Read the rest of the story here.)
This here Fastier fellow, Dear Readers, is a certifiable NUT CASE!
I’m not what you’d call ‘a drinking man’. The Bull comes from a long line of Appalachian moonshiners and I’ve known how to ‘make likker’ since I was a wee lad of ten, its just that I’ve seen too often the ravages brought down upon the families of hard drinking men. I don’t care to be remembered that way or put my loved ones through the pain.
All of that said, a nice cold Sam Adams® or Guinness® is mighty good – upon occasion – on a hot Mobile, AL summer day. The same can definately be said for a wee dram of a fine single malt Scotch on a cold winter evening. (Mead, of course, is good most anytime of year but damned hard to find anywhere.) A man has just got to know his limitations. Some men, sadly, never learn that one important lesson.
Scotch. It is such a truly Divine inspiration! So when I read that there is a case or two of a Scotch whiskey that no one has tasted in a century and some bloke says he’d rather preserve the mystery then The Bull thinks someone should measure the guy for one of those special jackets with the sleeves that tie in back! sure, whiskey stops aging when it is removed from the cask. However, it retains all of its flavor, (it doesn’t oxidize), so long as the seal on the bottle is not broken.
And no one has tasted this make of Scotch in many decades…
The Bull will donate his services to science and volunteer to taste this stuff for our good Kiwi friends! No charge! Just send a bottle to me care of this blog – I’ll even pay the postage from New Zealand!
I have the Honor to remain Your most Scientifically-minded Host,
Bull
Not enjoying that Scotch is criminal. It is a denial of its rightful destiny. If all you wanted to do was preserve the mystery, why extract it in the first place?