The best whisky might be aged in a sauna – or Antarctica

More than a century after whisky travelled south with Ernest Shackleton, a cask of the stuff has been sent back to Antarctica to find out whether one of the coldest places on the planet can change what flavours end up in the glass.

The single malt, from La Alazana distillery in Patagonia, was flown on an Argentine military C-130 Hercules to Base Marambio research station in 2022, where it matured for three years in one of the least convenient warehouses on earth. It is part of the 8 Continent series, in which whisky from each continent, including Zealandia, is being studied to see how much place can change a spirit’s flavour.

For decades, whisky has been sold on age. A 20-year-old should be richer than a 10-year-old, the thinking goes, because it has had longer to draw flavour from the wood. In scotch, years in oak became a hierarchy, with older bottles commanding higher prices, although older does not always mean better.

Scotch has tightly defined rules, while newer whisky-makers outside Scotland have more room to experiment and far less old stock waiting in warehouses. Partly through creative freedom, partly through economic necessity, they care less about how long a whisky sits in a cask and more about what happens to that cask while it waits. Heat, cold, humidity, movement, previous cask contents and location all shape flavour, and some producers are going to the ends of the earth to prove it.

Georgie Bell, of bottlers the Heart Cut, says drinkers who are new to whisky want flavour, story and “a true sense of place”, without the jargon, stereotypes or “glen’fuddlement” that can make whisky feel like homework.

The result is a growing number of spirits with better travel stories than a gap-year student. In Finland, Kyrö puts its rye whisky in a sauna, while Never Say Die, a bourbon made in Kentucky, matures as it crosses the Atlantic. In England, Rosemaund claims a whisky’s character is shaped during maturation, so rests its casks beside the family’s apple orchards in Herefordshire, while other English whisky-makers are storing casks in underground Second World War vaults. Metallica have taken the louder route, blasting barrels of their band-branded whisky with heavy metal in the hope that vibration helps the liquid interact with the wood.

Speed-ageing casks is not new. Linie Aquavit got there first, by accident, in 1805, when a shipment of its Norwegian potato spirit returned unsold from Indonesia, apparently improved after months on a ship, and crossing the equator twice. Unable to replicate that process at home, it now sends every barrel on the same journey, which probably keeps the sustainability team up at night.

“This is the first study of its kind to look at the chemical and sensory analysis following maturation,” says Dr Aline Bortoletto, the scientist leading the research into the 8 Continent whiskies. “Extreme conditions do not automatically mean better flavour, but they may produce different flavours.”

According to Lila Serenelli, master distiller at La Alazana – whose whisky recently returned from Antarctica – the place where a spirit is aged really does make a difference. “When we first tried the Antarctica whisky, we immediately recognised it was our whisky. Our DNA is there. But we realised there were more floral notes, and something different that our whisky doesn’t usually have.”

The risk is that sending spirits to the farthest corners of the planet becomes gimmicky, especially in a category that has never been shy about a good story. Daniel Monk, founder of the 8 Continent series, insists that is not the point. “It’s opening the door to ask what can we discover, and how we use the results to create a more sustainable whisky industry.”

That is the promise of experimental maturation, and the risk: the story has to show up in the glass. A spirit that has spent decades slowly changing in oak has a depth that cannot be faked by giving a barrel a sea view or a sauna membership. But age is no longer the only story worth telling. The next great whisky may not be the oldest: it may be the one that tastes most clearly of where it came from.