Wine fraud has, unfortunately, been a problem for decades, and savvy oenophiles know that high-value purchases should be vetted. The world of whiskey, though—particularly in the United States—is only just starting to come to grips with fakes and forgery. 

Luckily, one person has been on the case. Adam Herz runs the Facebook page Herz’s Serious Whiskey Info, where he shares information about common whiskey scams and outs counterfeiters. A screenwriter by trade (he gave us Stifler’s mom), he took up whiskey as a serious hobby in the early 2000s, and co-founded the Los Angeles Whisky Society (LAWS). Along the way, he learned a lot about bottle dating and other authentication methods, which led to work with collectors and auction houses.

As whiskey took off in the 2010s, so did counterfeit bottles. Appalled, Herz began publicly debunking these frauds. His extensive knowledge about whiskey history and packaging helps, but so does his innate skepticism.  

“As a teenager, I was a magician and I would do kids' birthday parties on the weekends,” Herz says. “What you learn as a magician is how easily people are fooled, and how easy it is to lie convincingly. And you start to see it pop up everywhere.” 

The New Wine Review sat down with Herz to discuss trends in whiskey and bourbon fakes, what buyers should look out for, and how bad the problem could get. Note: the following encompasses a lengthy interview with Herz and some follow-up inquiries conducted via email, and has been condensed and edited for clarity. 

The New Wine Review: How did you become the chief debunker of whiskey fraud in the U.S.? 

Adam Herz: The short version is: once whiskey became an online community, and social media was starting up, people were buying, trading, and selling. It was pretty clear that people that I would consider online friends or at least whiskey acquaintances were defrauding each other. I got pissed and did what pissed-off people tend to do, which is say “knock it off.”

When I first started, everyone was like, “Well, obviously you got scammed the most by this guy. How much money are you getting back from him?” What world do you live in where that has to be the motivation to be a decent person? That's never happened to me, by the way. I don't get scammed—knock wood, because I still might.

The long version is this: [Some friends and I] started the Los Angeles Whiskey Society back in 2006. The internet was still kind of 1.0. We started up a website to chronicle our meetings and tasting notes—and to make ourselves feel cool, because you’ve got to feel cool. I’d get an occasional email: “I found this bottle. Can you tell me what it is?” Sometimes we knew, just through our experience, but a lot of times we’re like, “We've got to research this.” At the time, we had to physically mine law libraries for regulations that would help date bottles, like glass coding. It is really commonly understood now, American glass coding post-Prohibition. 2012 rolls around. Bonhams had been auctioning whiskey for a few years, and they put up a bottle of Ardbeg circa late 1930s. They dated it as circa 1900. It had this message on it—which is really commonly understood by dusty hunters now—which says federal law forbids sale or reuse of this bottle. 

That's a post-Prohibition glass code. I emailed them and said, “Hey guys, this can't be circa 1900. It's got post-Prohibition glass encoding. It's right there in all your photos.” And they were like, “We're going to have to look into this. We're not sure because the owner swears it is circa 1900.” I'm like, “Well, that means absolutely nothing. Here's the law it's based on.”

At the time I thought auctioneers were experts. Some are, but not all. So I called them out, wrote an article on it, and that went viral. Not only did they have to pull the auction lot, but they actually had to delete the whole auction page because of all the traffic going to it. They just deleted the whole thing in shame.

What I realized is all the research we had been doing in LAWS for fun had turned us into experts. We knew stuff that wasn't common knowledge, and had pioneered some techniques that are now pretty commonplace. 

So social media hits, and I was like, “Guys, look at all these empty bottles that are selling on eBay. There's no way an empty bottle of Pappy Van Winkle 15 is going to sell for $200.” It's garbage. It's trash. “Oh, well, people are making lamps”—not for that much they're not. The whole point of making a tacky whiskey lamp is that you're taking a piece of garbage and turning it into something that kind of looks okay in your basement bar, right? This only costs me 18 bucks, or whatever. Nobody believed me. So I had to prove it, which was not hard. You simply go and you find an empty on eBay and you find that exact bottle turned into a refill posted on Facebook. That was maybe 2016. And then it just sort of snowballed.

On Facebook, I started finding these fakers, and then I called them out. I was very careful, especially at first. I would publish these dry, boring, bullet-pointed articles—this person did this, then they did this, then they did this—just to document that this person is a counterfeiter. Then they'd be banished from online whiskey circles. Okay, good. We're done with that guy. But the law doesn't care. Nobody's going to go after him. Using public funds to keep people’s whiskey hobby safer is not a top priority. Nothing really happens, unfortunately, in the U.S., but at least the hobby's a little cleaner.

That kept growing. I would get tips. Then, during the pandemic, like everybody else, I needed something extra to do. And I started that Facebook page.

NWR: Do you make money from this?

Herz: No. I lose money. I have to pay attorneys. I'm never going to print something untrue, but I'll get cease and desist letters. Some scummy people don't have boundaries: “We'll file a lawsuit against this guy. He'll pay us off,” or whatever idiot idea they may have. I just really make sure that they're never going to find a crack on the surface. 

NWR: How much of your work comes from tips versus you proactively looking for scammers?

I have to be a little cute. I don't like to talk about sources and methods, in the same way the FBI won't. It is probably fifty-fifty tips versus truly organic. It can be as simple as me just being bored and browsing through Facebook and going, “Well, that doesn't look right,” and bingo, there's the next little project: this guy is faking, but how am I going to prove it? 

That's usually the issue, by the way. Knowing someone's counterfeiting isn't hard. Proving it is where the difficulty comes in—it's compiling evidence that does two things. Demonstrates it to the public, but also demonstrates it to the faker—and especially whatever idiot attorney he might try to hire—you are dead in the water. Tuck your tail between your legs and walk away. Whenever I publish stuff, there are little Easter eggs for the counterfeiter, just to let him know that, whatever I might publish, this is the tip of the iceberg.

NWR: What kind of counterfeiters do you encounter? Professionals, or guys just trying to make a quick buck?

Herz: You've got three main categories. One is the home faker, which is somebody who is playing baller to his friends, showing off, trying to elevate his status, and just refilling bottles. This is super common. A lot of people consider it okay—like, if people can't tell the difference, then that's their stupid fault. It really upsets me when people say that because they can't tell the difference either, and they're being ignorant, stupid assholes to think they can. 

The reason I finally published an article about one of them is because this dickwad was profiting—not money-wise, but absolutely socially. Bottle shares are the big thing. People would take him for dinners. If you go to some wine event and everybody's pouring DRC and you're bringing imitation DRC, you get to drink tens of thousands of dollars of wine for free. And since you're a douchebag, you don't even have a guilty conscience. It's the same with whiskey.

I get so pissed about that because it’s the worst of humanity. You have these people that predicate friendships on pretense—that's not what friendship is. 

The second sort of counterfeiter—I used to call them the suburban dads. Just some dude. He's got a kid or two, a wife, and he lives out in suburbia somewhere. He's making fakes in his kitchen, and he's cranking out somewhere between $25,000 and a quarter-million dollars of fakes, and selling them to people who think he is a friend. As they expand, they will start to sell to randoms. That's the most common counterfeiter. They're just refilling and resealing.

The third type of faker are the true professionals, who aren't really in the whiskey community. They just scratch the surface enough to find victims. These are guys who have professional equipment and are refilling bottles incredibly well. They're doing stuff that the suburban dads can't do because you need materials, you need foil capsules, and you need the machine that applies them. The biggest one of them has been going on for almost 10 years now in Kentucky.

NWR: You know who it is, but you haven’t assembled your dossier to out him yet?

Herz: I know, the distilleries know, law enforcement knows. There is a reason this person has not been exposed. I don't mean by me—I mean there's a reason they're not sitting in prison, haven't been arrested, or had their property raided. It has nothing to do with me and everything to do with something going on in Kentucky.

I'm not saying that's a fact. But I'm saying: how could it not be? When the distillery says, “We know this person is faking, here's the information, law enforcement,” and then: nothing happens. And I check in and I say, “You guys know this person's still counterfeiting?” “Oh yes, we know.” “Here's some evidence.” “Oh, thank you.” Nothing happens. There's a reason nothing's being done. I can't speculate on what it is.  

NWR: It’s no secret that Buffalo Trace brands like Pappy Van Winkle and Weller get faked a lot. Their parent company, Sazerac, publicly rails against counterfeits. But Sazerac hasn’t taken many steps to make their bottles more difficult to counterfeit. Why?

Herz: Sazerac is a giant company. The brands that most bourbon heads are chasing are a very, very, very small fraction of Sazerac’s overall take. Pappy Van Winkle and even Blanton's and whatever—that's a drop in a very big bucket. It just doesn't appear to be a priority for them. I have spoken with them a number of times over the years, and keep in intermittent contact. We have a strained relationship, as you might imagine, but they know that when they're ready, I'm ready, and we can go down the road of taking effective measures towards anti-counterfeiting. Until then, I think that I've inadvertently done them a bit of a favor. By publicizing what's being counterfeited, it makes their stuff look cooler and better and more desirable.

NWR: How much of the American whiskey market is fake?

Herz: One way to look at it: sometimes the DEA will come out with their estimate of how much of some illegal drug is entering into the country. And even their experts—presuming they're being transparent—will be, like, “We know the heroin that we catch coming into the country.” They kind of know the stuff that they miss, but they don't know what they don't know. It's the same way with whiskey counterfeits, since the auction houses and I are mostly the ones who see the counterfeits. Can we estimate it? Yes and no. No, because we don't know the total amount of counterfeits out there, but we can take a decent guess. It's certainly less than 1%, without a doubt. [Note: In 2023, according to the Distilled Spirits Council, more than 31 million cases of American whiskey were sold.]

NWR: You’ve mentioned whole cloth fakes—everything counterfeited, from the bottle and label to the liquid inside, from the ground up—as being common in Europe, often wrapped up with organized crime. Could that happen here?

Herz: When whole cloth fakes pop up, crime syndicates will become involved. If I am sitting in a metropolitan area and I'm cranking out a lot of fakes, eventually, because I'm doing something illegal, someone will come and say, “Hey buddy, we like the work you do. However, you're in our territory. We're here to protect you, and we're going to take this cut of your profits.”

NWR: What makes you so sure it’s going to happen here?

Herz: It's just a materials issue. The technology is there. People are already doing it in a toy way. People will buy this Michter’s 20 Year that costs however many thousands of dollars, and then split it up into a whole bunch of little mini Michter’s. You'll see this on social media. It's fun! If I'm paying a few hundred bucks for an ounce and a half sample of something, it's a lot cooler when it comes in a mini that looks just like the real deal. How much harder is it to do those in 700 or 750 milliliters? There's no difference. Some of our first whole cloth counterfeiters will come from that world: eventually they can't resist the temptation and go, “Well, screw this. I'm just doing it full size.”

NWR: With a few exceptions, you don’t usually share your authentication techniques. Why not?

Herz: Usually, revealing ways to spot fakes just tells counterfeiters what to do better. In one of the early interviews I did on a blog, about what are the easiest brands to counterfeit, I offhandedly mentioned “this and this.” There was a faker I ended up busting about 10 months later. I discovered that he started the day after that interview was published, buying the exact brand of empties I said was easiest to fake. You just feel horrible when that happens: I inspired a counterfeiter. 

NWR: So how can a whiskey buyer avoid counterfeits on the secondary market?

Herz: Do not buy anything on Craigslist. You laugh, but people do. And when you're buying on the secondary market, you have to know what you're doing. 

There are really obvious things to look for. Some whiskey is sealed with a clear plastic shrink band. It’s a ring of shrink plastic that goes around the seal, and they hit it with a heat gun. Those are things to be very skeptical of, because in the United States, most counterfeits, if not all counterfeits, are refilled real bottles. The only thing to do is to look at the seal and ask yourself, if I was going to counterfeit this, would it be difficult?

Know who you're buying from, and where they sourced from. The problem there is that many people who inadvertently sell counterfeits are very trustworthy and sell a lot of whiskey. It's not necessarily their fault that they just bought a case of fakes. They just don't know any better. But some people do know better and just don't give a shit.

So even that is not the best advice anymore, but it's the best advice I can give. Buy from trustworthy sources that are fine being held accountable. And that doesn't just mean they'll give you a refund. At wine shops, you see it all the time. They sell a counterfeit bottle; “oh, well, return it and we're happy to give you your money back.” And then we'll sell that fake to someone else. They do the same thing with whiskey. “Oh, well, just return the fake and I'll refund your money.” I see it all the fucking time.

The most important thing for people to understand is that it's not just the expensive stuff. A counterfeiter will fake something if they can make 20 bucks off of it. One of the first guys I busted, I think it was 2016, was selling $60 Four Roses—fakes—to his neighbors. 

NWR: How does bourbon culture, where people like to show off their bottles, play into counterfeiting?

Herz: There's this pride in bourbon ownership. Some people aren't totally douchebaggy about it, but they're just going along with it and taking the crotch shot in their car, with the expensive watch and whatever else, just to be that guy. And I get that.

But a lot of people take it very, very seriously and really consider it part of their identity. Which means that when they get scammed, they stay super quiet, because they can't take the shame. The cognitive dissonance is just unbearable. They just want it out of their brains.

The other problem is this belief that your palate is awesome. No, my pal, it isn't. I mean, I think my palate is pretty awesome, but I know all of its flaws, because even awesome palates suck. We're human. We're fallible. We taste what we expect to taste. Something has to be really, really terrible for you not to find a way to like it. Most bourbon just tastes like bourbon. It makes it much harder to deal with fakes.