Relating to this story about a case of 100 year old Scotch being recovered from a hut used by Shackleton.
It sounds like nobody is going to get to drink any of it but would they want to? The temperature wasn’t low enough to actually freeze the alcohol but will it be as ‘aged’ as Scotch that was stored in a distillery for 100 years? Is there an optimum temperature it should be kept at to ensure the largest ‘improvement’ per year?
Whiskey… or any other aged product for that matter, isn’t aged in bottles, but in barrels. It’s basically dead once you bottle it… unless the cork fails. A bottle of Scotch bottled 40 years ago, with whiskey that was aged for 10 years… is a 40 year old bottle of 10 year old whiskey.
AFAIK, scotch doesn’t “age” in the bottle, only in the cask.
To elaborate the above… Scotch whisky - Wikipedia
After distilling the whisky is finished it is put into wooden barrels for aging. During this time the whisky soaks into the wood and evaporates from the barrel by up to 2%/year. This concentrates the whisky and allows the flavors to develop.
Once the whisky is bottled the aging process stops since the evaporation no longer occurs. If they had found some casks of whisky, then that would be very interesting.
I am not a Scotch drinker, but the tour we took at Strathisla in Speyside, Scotand was fascinating and allowed us to appreciate the differences in Scotches and ages of Scotches.
Just to add a wee bit. Most whiskies are blended (be they called blended or malt whiskies), ie they are a mix of contents from two or more casks. The age of this mix is the age of the youngest whisky in it regardless of amount, so if you use, say, 1% of a three year old (minimum age to be called whisky in Scotland) and 99% of a 20 year old it will be sold as a three year old whisky.