Antarctica discovery: How ‘unexpected treasure’ was found buried below ice by researchers

“Only then did they manage to extract the boxes carefully, the whiskey was then defrosted over almost two weeks.

“It turned out that the bottles survived their century-long confinement.”

Bottled in 1898 after the blend was aged 15 years, the Mackinlay bottles were among three crates of Scotch and two of brandy found buried in 2010.

Distiller the, 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.

The recipe for the whisky had been lost, but Whyte Mackay recreated a limited edition of 50,000 bottles from a sample drawn with a syringe through a cork of one of the bottles. 

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