How it works

1. The flavour profile

To compare whiskies and find the ones that are alike, we describe each one with 12 traits, scored from 0 (absent) to 5 (dominant):

• Sweet
• Fresh fruit
• Ripe and dried fruit
• Floral and herbal
• Cereal and malt
• Vanilla and creamy
• Oak
• Spicy
• Toasted
• Smoky
• Maritime
• Body and intensity

The dominant notes on each page are the three highest traits (not counting body), as long as they are clearly noticeable. Smoky and maritime weigh a little more when comparing, because they divide people the most: many love smoke, and others just can’t take it.

Where does the profile come from?

At first, each whisky’s profile is an estimate made from public information. The texts and flavour profiles are written with the help of artificial intelligence (Claude, by Anthropic), following fixed rules, and they are always original: we don’t copy tasting notes, scores or texts from other websites. That is why the pages say so with the label “Estimated profile”.

Objective data, such as age, strength or casks, is checked against official sources. If a fact is not reliably known, we don’t show it (you will see a dash “–”); we never fill it in with a guess.

How the community refines it

When you rate a whisky you can tick the notes you noticed (honey, smoke, raisins…). When enough people do so, those tags adjust the profile. We blend the initial estimate with what the community says, and the community weighs more the more tastings there are. An example: if a page estimates a lot of smoke and almost everyone who tries it ticks “smoke”, the profile confirms it and goes up a little. If nobody mentions a note, we don’t delete it at once: we take it that it doesn’t stand out, not that it isn’t there.

While there are few tastings you will see “Estimated profile, refined by n tastings”. With ten or more it becomes “Community profile”.

2. Scores and approval

Each page shows two community figures, and they are never mixed:

• Score (0 to 10). The average of what registered people have given for nose, palate and finish in a full rating. Value for money is separate, because it depends on the price. The score you see is always the real average.
• Approval (“86% like it”). It counts every vote, including the quick ones from the deck: “love it”, “like it” or “don’t like it”. Each person chooses it; we never infer it from a score.

If there are few votes we tell you (“Few votes”), because three happy people are not the same as three hundred. To sort, the default order (“Relevance”) uses approval adjusted for the number of votes. That way, a whisky with two perfect votes doesn’t sneak ahead of one with two hundred almost perfect ones. If there are no votes yet, they all tie and we break the tie by how easy each one is to find and how sure we are of its profile, so the lists don’t look like rankings that don’t exist yet.

Only people with an account count. Votes you give without signing up stay in your browser and don’t appear in public scores.

3. Affinity and “if you like this one, try…”

We measure how alike two whiskies are by comparing their 12 traits. The result is a percentage: the higher, the more alike. That is what you see in “If you like this one, try…” and in the cheaper alternatives, which only appear when they are truly alike (from 80%).

Your affinity (“87% your match”) is the same calculation, but between the whisky and your palate.

4. Your palate

Your taste profile is built from three things:

• The quiz in Find your whisky: questions about everyday things (coffee, chocolate, a bonfire…), with no judgement and no right answers. If you say you are a beginner, we avoid recommending very intense whiskies at first.
• Your votes in the deck of cards. A “love it” pushes your profile towards that whisky; a “don’t like it”, the other way.
• Your full ratings, when you make them: a high score brings your profile closer and a low one moves it away.

From there we give you an archetype (for example, “Peat Monster” or “Sherry Bomb”), which is a fun way of summing up your palate, not a fixed label: it changes as you discover things. You can see all of this in Your profile.

Without an account, we calculate it in your browser and it never leaves it. With an account, we save it so you have it on all your devices. The limits you set (for example, “I can’t stand smoke”) are respected until you rate highly a whisky that goes beyond them: then we understand you have discovered that you do like it.

5. How we recommend

For each whisky we calculate a score that combines:

• How well it suits your palate (what weighs most).
• How highly it is rated by the community.
• Value for money, when there is data.

Before sorting, we leave out those that go beyond your limits, those outside your budget and those you have already tried or own. If you are starting out, we lower the ones that are very strong, very intense or hard to find. We stop the top from filling up with almost identical whiskies or ones from the same distillery. Each recommendation explains why (“It’s like… which you love”, “It has what you’re looking for: …”).

With the same votes, you always get the same list. And, as the affiliate disclosure explains, no commission enters the calculation.

6. Prices and buying

WhiskyMatch doesn’t sell whisky. When we link to a shop, the price and availability come from the shop’s own catalogues or official interfaces, with the date of the last update. We don’t scrape any website or show estimated prices as if they were real. Offers in the comparison are sorted by availability and price.

7. Where the data comes from

• The list of whiskies is our own selection of bottles sold in Spain, from the most popular to the classics of each region and style.
• Basic distillery data (founding year, location, owner) comes partly from Wikidata, under a CC0 licence. Thanks to everyone who maintains it.
• The facts of each whisky are checked against the brands’ official websites, without copying their texts.
• The texts, profiles and tasting notes are original and made with the help of AI, as explained above. The English versions are AI translations of the Spanish ones.
• Community scores and profiles come from users’ ratings.

8. What we don’t do and what can go wrong

• Taste is personal. Affinity and scores are a guide, not an objective truth.
• Estimated profiles can be wrong, and batches of the same whisky can vary from one year to the next.
• We don’t accept money to position a whisky or to write reviews.
• We don’t encourage drinking more. What we reward when you rate is discovering and giving your opinion, not drinking.

Have you spotted a mistake on a page or something that doesn’t add up? Tell us through the contact form.

Drink responsibly. The sale of alcohol to anyone under 18 is prohibited.