We take whisky seriously around here, and if you’re reading this, you probably do too. But you know who doesn’t take whisky seriously? A guy who has tasted more of it than just about anyone else on the planet. Serge Valentin, founder of whiskyfun.com, has written more than 25,000 whisky reviews. But he tries to keep his priorities in order. “It’s only whisky,” he says. “Whisky is important only to people who make it or people who drink way too much of it. Otherwise, it’s just a funny thing.”

It’s clear from the jump that Whiskyfun doesn’t take much of anything seriously. The site was established in 2002—and it definitely looks like it. “By surfing this website you acknowledge that you are of legal drinking age in your country of residence but that you’re no wet blanket either,” reads a banner at the top of the homepage. Yet despite its Geocities vibes and “100% low tech” stamp, Whiskyfun is one of the internet’s most useful repositories of tasting notes, covering everything from standard Glenlivet 12-year-old to thousands of obscure, rare, and antique whiskies. 

Want to compare hundreds of independent bottlings of Highland Park? Explore the flavors of demolished distilleries like Glenlochy or St. Magdalene? Go deep—really deep—into Brora/Clynelish? Whiskyfun’s got you covered. It’s ad-free, fully independent, and written in the charming tone of a Frenchman who likes whisky very much but has a limited tolerance for nonsense. Valentin focuses on scotch whiskies, but his archive also includes bottles from the United States, Ireland, Japan, and many other countries, as well as a deep trove of “malt-ernative” spirits like cognac, armagnac, and rum. He's also a wine lover, though he’s quick to emphasize that while he tastes whisky, he drinks wine.

If you’ve gotten into whisky in the last 10 years, you might look at Whiskyfun and see just another old blog, a relic of the era before anybody with an iPhone could take off-the-cuff videos of their at-home tastings and scatter them across the internet. But the website’s influence is surprisingly big. Distillers, blenders, and especially marketers pay attention to what Serge writes. His mustachioed face is as recognizable in the scotch industry as Tom Brady’s is in football..

“I know the industry likes Whiskyfun,” he says, then corrects himself. “I mean—no, the industry doesn't like it, but the people within the industry do. Which is not exactly the same thing.”

The New Wine Review talked with Valentin about the arrogance of scotch, the evolution of distilleries into brands, and what sets true collectors apart from dilettantes.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

The New Wine Review: Over nearly 50 years, you’ve tasted tens of thousands of scotch whiskies from a period that goes decades into the past and up to the modern day. You have a deep and broad view of quality over time. How does it stand today—is whisky better or worse than in the past?

Serge Valentin: I believe the average is better now because they learned how to mature whisky better. That's not just a myth. On the other hand, it's become much more technical. They know how the casks behave, they know how to make STR [shaved, toasted, and recharred] casks and bespoke casks. But the style has changed quite a lot. They don’t care about wood at the beginning [of the aging period], and later they amend the profile using a very active wood.

So the distillate itself has less importance than before, and the wood has more. By that I mean wood, plus what was put into the wood before, because many people use casks that have been made for whisky, so they pour cheap wine into it, and then it becomes a sherry cask or whatever—and that's more and more important. That's why there's very few whiskies where you don't see the name of a wine or a wood on the label now, like mizunara or PX. That’s new. Twenty years ago nobody was doing that.

NWR: Do you think we’ve lost something in Scotch whisky because of this?

SV: Yeah, that's the flip side. We probably lost the chance to make a great whisky—I was about to say by mistake. Since they don’t make any mistakes anymore, there’s no chance to have a great cask [by accident]. In terms of Whiskyfun ratings, before it was from 60 points to 98 in the 100 point scale. Now it's more between 78 and 92; it's much more narrow. You don't have bad whiskies anymore. There are a few, but not in Scotland. I haven't come across a very bad whisky in some time.

NWR: You had your first single malt whisky in 1978. What was scotch like then?

SV: In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, you could find very few malts. In France, for example, you had Glenfiddich and Cardhu. These whiskies were very good, because they were bottling perhaps 2 percent of the production, so you would suppose they selected the best casks. They were superb! If you drink them today, they're brilliant. As for blends, I'm afraid that I couldn't really tell you. When you open a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label from the ‘70s today, it's quite good. But I remember: back then, we hated it. Nobody was drinking blended whisky neat. Today we drink it neat. We analyze it, we drink it in a Glencairn glass.

NWR: Maybe your palate wasn’t as refined back then, so you couldn’t appreciate the blends.

SV: I was young, so I had no experience. But France has always been a very different market. It’s the number one market in Scotch whisky volume in the world—not in value, in volume. My theory, but I think it holds, is that Scotch whisky was really the drink of the liberators. The soldiers that came to France in ‘44, ‘45, these guys were drinking bourbon and scotch and they brought some bottles. Instantly anything the French were distilling—for example, cognac—went out of fashion. Whisky was first the drink of the liberators, then the drink of jazz, rock and roll, and it just went on and on. It’s still in the collective psyche.

The youngsters today—20 or 25—they don’t know history. They have no fathers who fought in the war, they never met a grandpa or grandma who met with American soldiers like we did. So it's vanishing in the air. Things will change for sure.

NWR: You were a founding member of the Malt Maniacs, an enthusiast group that was once pretty influential in whisky circles, including via its awards, and you’ve kept WhiskyFun going for all these years with its same delightfully old-school interface. But the landscape of the whisky blogger has changed a lot.

SV: The Malt Maniacs were one of the early online communities—it was actually the first one. In the industry, they were calling anybody being into whisky and on the internet a “malt maniac.” And nobody knew in the industry at that time how to behave with the internet. Everybody was scared. You even had seminars organized in companies such as Diageo: how to deal with the Malt Maniacs. Seriously! I’ve got the PowerPoint. “Can the Malt Maniacs wreck lives and break careers?”

That was 25 years ago. Nowadays, everything has changed. Many, many more blogs and groups and Facebook and forums. At that time, the internet was a counterculture in a way, and people dealing with a certain subject, be it malt whisky or stones or cars or whatever, it was always from a countercultural point of view. It changed a lot when you started to have big money poured into the internet.

NWR: What do you think of the widespread adoption of influencer culture? There’s an awful lot of people being paid to review or talk about whisky on social media these days.

SV: I couldn’t tell you. I don’t know. I’m ROMO—relief of missing out. Or JOMO—joy of missing out.

NWR: That’s fair! Let’s talk about pricing. Prices for many Scotch whiskies, especially ones that are considered rare, have risen dramatically since you first started blogging. I’ve started to think of it as similar to fine wine, where something like Romanée-Conti is out of reach for all but the very wealthiest buyers. Have we crossed a threshold with certain Scotch whiskies as well, where they’ll never be in reach for the average drinker?

SV: Absolutely. That’s the main difference in the whisky world from when I started—I started Whiskyfun in 2002, and the Malt Maniacs started in 1995. Even in the year 2000, you could gather people around the table to drink the best whisky in the world, and you could have an entrepreneur, an artist, a guy who works in the plant, a housemaid, a guy who’s just a gardener, and a guy who’s rich like Croesus. There were no social differences because all the whiskies were cheap.

The price of a whisky used to depend on the age. You had the price for an 8, a 10, a 12, a 15, and 18, and there was no brand. The notion of brand didn't exist. I remember the first time I chatted with [Scottish whisky writer] Charles MacLean 25 years ago or so, and I told him about a certain whisky. I can't remember exactly which one, but I told him about the brand. He said, it's not a brand. It's a distillery.

That was the way it was seen at that time. It was a distillery. Branding came later, with Ardbeg and Macallan and Dalmore. Before that, the price of an Ardbeg 10-year-old and Speyburn 10-year-old were the same. There was no difference. And the same with the 20- or 25-year-olds.

I remember the first time we saw whiskies in the shop window priced at more than 100 euros, we were really, really pissed off. We thought, these guys are pulling our leg. Are they crazy?

NWR: You’re an ad man by trade. Do you have any thoughts on Scotch whisky marketing?

SV: It’s changing. It’s not in the open yet, but when you see Glenmorangie 12-year-old replacing 10-year-old with new packaging, that means something. Five years ago they would have replaced it with a no-age-statement. Now they’re producing five times what they sell per year. They hope that they will manage to sell five times more in 10 years’ time. They all dream of [selling the excess through increased exports to] India, but it’s going to be tough.

Many brands have become very arrogant. What they call premiumization—the real word is arrogance. Putting a bottle on a pedestal and saying it's worth twice what it used to be, and creating some distance between the product and the people who make it and the consumer—it is very different from 20 years ago. Then, they were trying to put the people in the distilleries into contact with the whisky lovers and the tourists. Now that has changed a lot. At visitor centers they put you in front of a stupid movie. But I think now it's going to shrink back. It's the end of the age of arrogance for many brands.

NWR: Way back in 2010 you wrote, “I hate whisky speculators.” The problem of speculation and flipping has gotten so much worse since then. Is it a permanent part of the whisky landscape now?

SV: If the prices go down, the speculators are dead. I don't know what's going to happen. I suppose the prices will go down. They already go down at auctions. People used to fly to the Islay Festival just to buy the bottles and fly back and put them on eBay immediately. At that time, the bottles at the Islay Festival were cheap, because the brands were trying to reward the people, so to speak, by providing them with a good and sometimes young whisky that was fairly priced. Those were the early flippers.

Whisky lovers usually buy much more whisky than they drink. Otherwise they would be all dead now. So they accumulate bottles and at some point they see the prices have gone up and they start to sell because they think, “Wow, I bought this bottle for 50 euros and the price is now 500 euros.” And you can't blame them if they are people who need money and are not rich.

NWR: You’ve also said that collectors who are in it just to make money are not really collectors—they’re merchants. Is a true collector only someone who intends to enjoy their collection?

SV: A collector is somebody who gathers something that he likes and usually specializes. In the old days, you would have Bowmore collectors, Glenfiddich collectors, Laphroaig collectors, whatever. They would buy everything [from a distillery] because at that time you could buy everything. These guys ended up being much more knowledgeable about the whisky than the distilleries themselves. They were buying the books. They were going to the university in Glasgow [which has whisky-related archives]. They were doing everything.

These are true collectors. A proper Laphroaig collector knows that the actual year of founding of the history is absolutely not 1815, for example. They even write books. To me there’s a notion of knowledge behind the collection. It's not just accumulating bottles. And you never collect to sell. Usually they sell because they have to. Or they swap doubles, or they sell when they've got doubles. So they have a bottle, it's a bit dirty. They find another one which is nicer, and they sell the old one. That’s all.

NWR: Is there too much trend-chasing in whisky these days?

SV: I think so. You’ve always got these fights between marketing, the accountants, and the production people. And production people are not very happy to see, like, Lagavulin dumped into a tequila cask just because the company owns Don Julio. But then the question I'm asking myself is, do the young guys who are into whisky care about that or not? To me, it's shocking to see. But maybe it's not shocking at all. Maybe it’s even a bit fascist to need this purity in the product. You know Seinfeld—the soup Nazi? Maybe we’re whisky Nazis.

I just hope that whisky will be all right, especially the small [distillers] who are starting out now and trying to do it right. That’s the difficult part, because they have to sell for a lot of money. You can’t sell a bottle for 30 euros if you do direct-firing, extra-long fermentation, etc. These guys, I don’t know how they can manage.

That’s the only concern with the market going down, unless we whisky lovers buy them because they’re better. As it happens with wine: you’ve got some small wine growers who work well because people are really fond of their products and buy them. And I hope there will be enough whisky people who are deep into whisky, as some wine lovers are deep into wine, and buy these products from them.