More important news for mikey

"Who wants a nip of the Sheep Dip whisky?" asked Another Kiwi, rather foolishly some would say.

"I could certainly cope with a wee'd ram", says I.

A year ago we touched upon Antarctic whisky, and the research program to reverse-engineer its components, certainly no-one hoping that it contains Shuggoth DNA. There are developments:

In Feb 2011, after required negotiations, Whyte & Mackay company owner Dr Vijay Mallya personally flew to Christchurch to collect and take three bottles back to Scotland using his private jet. Whyte & Mackay’s master blender Richard Paterson and his expert team spent eight weeks deconstructing, analysing and marrying malt whiskies to "recreate" the ancient samples. They needed to match the delicacy, sweetness, fragrance, spice and smokey notes of the "Rare Old Highland Malt". For this they have used malt whiskies ranging from 8 to 30 years of age. The Whyte and Mackay malt brands include Dalmore, Jura and Highland Park. It would be expected that these may form part of the recreation but at it's core is malt whisky from Glen Mhor, which was the original Mackinlay distillery before it closed in 1983.

Whisky Magazine man Dave Broom is claimed to be the only other person in the world to have tasted both the original and the recreation. Whyte & Mackay’s website quotes him as "The Shackleton whisky is not what I expected at all, and not what anyone would have expected. It’s so light, so fresh, so delicate and still in one piece – it’s a gorgeous whisky. I think the replication is absolutely bang on."

So where can you taste the stuff? It turns out not to be so difficult if you live in upsy-downy land.

If the consumers undergo massive ontogenic transformations (resulting from the unmasking of hitherto-methylated HOX genes) and transform into a body-plan with novel sense organs and five-fold-symmetry, we will have to conclude that there was some DNA contamination after all.