The other day, in the Broadway Ballroom of the Marriott Marquis Hotel, WhiskeyFest kicked off in New York City with a “grand tasting” of over two hundred and fifty varieties. In a smaller room upstairs, one whiskey was on lavish display, set to music that may well have been the soundtrack to “Master and Commander.” On each table was a bottle of Mackinlay’s Rare Old Highland Malt Whisky, tucked in a box packed untidily with straw to evoke the sense of discovery of a long-forgotten treasure. It was an elaborate marketing setup, grasping for the grand mythology of adventure worthy of Russell Crowe—or at least a cable-TV special.

In 2007, a conservation team from the New Zealand Antarctic Heritage Trust—stationed in the Antarctic to restore the hut of the Heroic Age explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton—uncovered three crates of the whiskey. They were frozen into the ice, and the team had to break through to lift them out—hundred-year-old bottles, still intact. One crate was sent, on loan, to the Whyte & Mackay distillery in Scotland, which proceeded to recreate the blend.

On the eve of WhiskeyFest, an audience gathered with full glasses for a presentation launching a second release of the whiskey—newly blended after the initial batch of fifty thousand bottles sold out within nine months. Richard Paterson, who is the master blender for Whyte & Mackay but also goes by “The Nose,” stood on a podium to address the crowd. Gray-haired and mustachioed, he wore a suit with a red pocket square, and behind him was a slide-show image of him in a white lab coat, glowering for the camera and holding a bottle of scotch. Paterson has a thick Scottish accent and perfect diction; he speaks authoritatively, in a loud staccato. “Being in the whiskey industry for the last forty-seven and a half years, I have to say, in all honesty, this was one quest, this was one journey, that I’ll never forget. Because it went twenty-six thousand nine hundred and thirty-six miles,” he said.

Most liquors come with a backstory—a lineage, a patron saint, an exotic origin—but this one was born of a long-ago expedition, and now it is sponsoring another. In 1907, Shackleton embarked from London at the start of the British Imperial Antarctic Expedition; his small ship, the Nimrod, carried about a dozen men and twenty-five cases of Mackinlay’s whiskey. His aim was to be the first person to reach the South Pole. En route, in 1908, he and his crew arrived at Cape Royds, where they erected a wooden hut to store supplies (liquor included). When they returned to sea, they faced treacherous blizzards, and failed to reach their destination. Upon his return home, Shackleton told his wife, “Better a live donkey than a dead lion.” (Not long after, the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen arrived at the South Pole, and later became the first man to reach the North Pole.)

But in 1914, Shackleton set out again, this time with twenty-eight men on the Endurance. “Of course, nothing went right,” said Tim Jarvis, a modern-day glory-seeking explorer who has made unsupported treks through such inhospitable terrain as the northern Arctic and Australia’s Great Victoria Desert. While on his adventures, Jarvis recreates the conditions faced by the explorers he emulates—all fur pelts and pelican meat, no twenty-first-century conveniences. Measured and mellow, he perched on a stool on the WhiskeyFest platform, describing shipwrecks and seal-blubber breakfasts as though they were features on a new iPad. For his next mission, he will set sail in January to recreate Shackleton’s Endurance voyage—in a twenty-two-foot whaler, well-stocked with whiskey, courtesy of Whyte & Mackay.

Jarvis will retrace a hazardous trail. Shackleton and his crew were cast adrift on floating ice in upturned lifeboats for months, until, by the drifting currents, they came to open ocean; then they reached land at Elephant Island, where the five strongest men reinforced one of the boats with planks and took it to South Georgia. There, they arrived on the wrong side and had to traverse mountains to access the whaling manager’s house. When Shackleton knocked on the door, the manager, who knew him well, opened it and, as Jarvis tells it, “Before him he saw this bedraggled, frostbitten, dirty, bearded, scraggly-looking individual, and said, ‘Who are you?’ And he said, ‘Well, I’m Shackleton.’ ” In the end, all survived, though the crew returned in time to fight in the First World War, and many died in the trenches.

Jarvis, after recounting this tale with disconcerting calm, continued, “We’re offering the opportunity for hardy souls to come and participate, with a price tag of twenty thousand dollars.” The fifty-six-day trip will take passengers on a support vessel stocked with equipment for scientific research and a film crew, who will compile the adventure into a four-hour documentary for the Discovery Channel. None raised a hand. “It’s not often that in the sponsorship contract, there’s a requirement to actually take the product south and drink it,” Jarvis said, adding, without a trace of irony, “if you’ve seen the size of the boat and seen the size of the waves—a hundred-foot wave is not uncommon—then I suspect that the success of the expedition will probably come down to the consumption of the product.”

Back to consumption. According to Paterson, there is only one right way to drink whiskey, which he demonstrated, first with the pour—“to make sure that it goes to every part of the glass”—and then, suddenly tossing it out, a splash on the carpet—“that means the lip of the glass is absolutely clean and clear.” He shoved his nose in the re-filled glass three times, saying (1) “Hello,” (2) “How are you,” (3) “Quite well, thank you very much.” This method is tried and true.

The recreated whiskey is 47.3 per cent alcohol, stronger than is standard; it’s heavily smoky and has, as Paterson says, “a whisper of peat.” It took him months to develop the blend, which was devised after he extracted the original without opening a bottle—by dislodging the cork and running a syringe down the side. Because the distillery only got the whiskey temporarily, they have to return it, just as it was received, to the Antarctic Heritage Trust (to be sent along with a donated percentage of the profits). But Paterson snuck a taste. “Not many people could say they’ve had whiskey in the fridge for a hundred and three years and it’s still drinkable,” he said. “That whiskey that I tasted still was. Unlike the biscuits and the baked beans and the tomatoes.”

Paterson keeps it in a little vial in his pocket. Several months ago it was full, but when he pulled it out to show me, I noticed that half seemed to have disappeared. He was still holding it in his hand as he explained, “Anything brought from Antarctica must stay there. That’s the treaty. Nothing should leave it.”

“So the three bottles you were studying, they have to go back?”

“Yes.”

“So,” I pointed to the vial, “Do you have to pour that back in?”

“No! But don’t tell them that,” he suddenly grabbed my elbow, anxious. “It’s just a small amount.”

Photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress.