Mackinlay's

Modern whisky drinkers tend to gravitate towards spirits produced in-house by specific distilleries, but in the early years of scotch whisky much more emphasis was placed on blenders and bottlers. Spirits merchants would source whisky from one or more distilleries, blend them together (often using some secondary maturation process) and sell them under their own brand name. This is how the likes of Johnnie Walker and Famous Grouse started, and they still source their spirits from other facilities and blend them together to create the perfect flavor profile to this day.

Charles Mackinlay started down that same path in 1815, registering as a wine merchant in Leith, Scotland near the water on the northern edge of Edinburgh. Originally, the shop was an agent for a brand of blended whisky called Macfarlane’s but in 1847 the shop saw the opportunity for increased profits if they sourced and bottled their own spirits under their own brand name. Thus, “Original Mackinlay Scotch Whisky” was born.

Demand for their product was excellent, and led to the company building their own distillery to help source enough spirits for their booming blended whisky business. In 1892 they helped build the Glen Mhor distillery in Inverness and, as a result, their bottles feature the words “Leith & Inverness” in cursive writing on the bottom of the label.

Those who know about Mackinlay (other than whisky nerds) probably know the name from it’s association with Sir Ernest Shackleton’s first Polar expedition in 1907. In an effort to bolster the team’s morale, Shackleton purchased 25 cases of Mackinlay’s Rare Old Highland Malt product (a Single Malt whisky from the Glen Mhor distillery) and brought them on his attempt to reach the South Pole. The expedition turned back about 97 miles from the pole in a decision to save the lives of his men but was still the closest anyone had ever been at the time. 100 years later, three crates of that exact whisky were discovered preserved in ice below Shackleton’s camp in Antarctica and moved to New Zealand to be carefully thawed and preserved.

In 2011, three of those bottles were purchased by Whyte & Mackay master blender Richard Paterson, who attempted to reverse engineer the flavor profile of those bottles and re-create something that closely matched what Shackleton and his men would have enjoyed all those years ago on that expedition. While the original bottles were a SIngle Malt whisky from the now-closed Glen Mhor distillery, this recreation uses a marriage of single malt whiskies from different sources to create the desired flavour profile.