Vijay Mallya ‘hand-carries century old bottles of whisky to Glasgow’

WELLINGTON - Indian liquor baron Vijay Mallya jetted into Christchurch to hand-carry three bottles of whisky, left from British explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton’s 1907 Antarctic expedition, to Glasgow.

The bottles of Mackinlay whisky were among three crates that remained of the expedition, and were found in ice under the floorboards of Shackleton’s hut at Cape Royds on Ross Island near McMurdo Sound in 2007.

The bottles had been at the Canterbury Museum since August last year.

Mallya, 55, whose firm Whyte and Mackay took over the Mackinlay distillery, which produced the whisky more than a century ago, took the bottles under an agreement with the Christchurch-based Antarctic Heritage Trust.

He is taking the whisky back to Scotland to be scientifically analysed, and said it was a historic moment for the whisky industry.

“Never before has anyone had access to a bottle of whisky that’s more than a century old and, more importantly, spent more than 100 years in a natural freezer under extreme conditions,” Stuff.co.nz quoted him as saying.

Mallya flew to Christchurch to collect the whisky because he was reluctant to leave the bottle in a cargo hold.

“I decided to bring my private jet and pick it up myself and hand-carry it to Glasgow,” he said.

The original recipe had been lost, but the trust said an attempt might be made to replicate it after the analysis. (ANI)