The Whisky That Went on Holiday to Antarctica

Published November 5, 2025 by John Fegan

Whisky is not, by nature, an adventurous substance. It prefers to stay in one place, usually a barrel, where it can spend several quiet decades occasionally expanding, contracting and achieving a level of philosophical insight normally reserved for monks and cats. It does not expect to travel. It certainly does not expect relocation to Antarctica, a place best described as “winter that has given up any attempt at subtlety” or “Scotland as remembered by George R. R. Martin after the heating broke.”

Yet this is what happened when the good people of La Alazana, a distillery located in Patagonia where the weather is only mildly homicidal, decided that their whisky needed a change of scenery. So the casks were packed up, presumably blinking in confusion, before being shipped south and sent to a research base so remote even the penguins treat it like a punishment posting.

The casks themselves were not consulted*. Whisky is never asked. It is a silent observer in its own biography and would probably have responded with something along the lines of “I’d prefer not to freeze solid, thanks” if anyone had waited long enough for the answer to drip out.

But the distillery had an idea. A huge, enthusiastic, scientifically questionable idea. The sort of idea that begins with “What if…” and ends with someone discovering that penguins are very poor conversationalists.

*Whisky is rarely consulted. Even the batch that was aged aboard the International Space Station was given no say in the matter, despite the lack of oxygen, scenery, and any chance of nipping out for a glass of water.

A Distillery With Big Ideas and Warm Socks

La Alazana sits in Patagonia, where the mountains are large and the weather is opinionated. They also use local peat, partly because it will one day be traditional and partly because hauling in Scottish peat would involve paperwork, and nobody wants that. The distillery is young, determined and seems to be run by people who believe that whisky should have stories, not just tasting notes. Or they’ve been talking to someone at Bruichladdich.

In 2022, someone at the distillery had a thought. Thoughts are notoriously unpredictable things. They start out small, like a mouse, and then grow into something the size of a horse when no one is looking. The idea was simple. If Scotch whisky becomes wonderful by ageing in cold, damp warehouses, what happens if you let it age somewhere even less hospitable. Somewhere where the barrels might start developing existential questions and file a complaint with HR.

The whisky was decanted into ex–Maker’s Mark barrels, because even adventurous whisky still wants to live somewhere familiar, and sent to Base Marambio. Base Marambio, for those not currently collecting specialised knowledge about Antarctic rocks or the people who study them, is an Argentine research station where the temperature slides gracefully between “cold enough to hurt your face” and “cold enough to hurt your face, only at a more leisurely pace as the weather has time to kill.”

The Science Bit, because every story eventually attracts a scientist

Whisky forms an emotional bond with wooden barrels that depends entirely on temperature, in the same way people form emotional bonds with central heating. When things are warm, the whisky expands into the wood, absorbing flavour, colour and enough interesting molecules to make professional critics write tasting notes that border on surrealist literature. When it is cold, the whisky retreats back out again, sulking like a teenager who has been asked to tidy their room, and insisting it never wanted to be in the wood anyway.

Antarctica is almost always cold, which means the whisky behaves like any creature with self-preservation instincts. It stays put, huddled inside the barrel, refusing to evaporate into the sort of air that dissuades noses from being attached to faces.

The result, according to La Alazana’s distiller, is a whisky with “a floral note not usually found in our spirit,” which is exactly the sort of thing one says when something unexpected has occurred and everyone involved is trying to sound pleased instead of confused.

Enter: The Continent Series

The whole concept is the fault of a company called Cask World, which sounds suspiciously like a theme park designed by enthusiastic drunks with access to a branding consultant. Their plan is to bottle whisky aged on all eight continents, plus the secret ninth one, Zealandia, which most people do not know about because it is inconveniently at the bottom of the ocean and therefore difficult to put on a postcard.

The project is supposedly not just for whisky drinkers but also “for scientists,” who will study isotopes, minerals and the subtle influence of weather systems that are actively trying to kill you. Eventually there will be a paper explaining how whisky matures differently depending on where it has been abandoned to ponder the whims of humans and why they keep doing this sort of thing.

What Happens Next

The whisky is currently being sampled by Charles MacLean, who occupies roughly the same position in the whisky world that Gandalf occupies in Middle-earth. Always there, always quoting something, always bearded. People trust him, possibly because he looks as if he has already drunk everything worth drinking and survived.

The plan is to sell the bottles in 2026 to the kind of folk who love telling guests, “Aye, this one was aged beside a research hut where the food was frozen, the heating was theoretical and the despair could be scraped off the walls.” Most probably for the price of a small town in Patagonia.

Meanwhile, the barrels themselves are back in Argentina, slowly thawing out and doubtless preparing a strongly worded complaint about working conditions. In summary

• Whisky endures.
• Scientists publish findings nobody reads.
• Collectors queue up with credit cards.
• And somewhere in Antarctica, a very confused glacier is trying to work out why it smells oddly of oak, effort and a marketing department that got carried away.