A free Whisky alternative for your Mac

What happened to Whisky

Whisky was a popular free SwiftUI front end for Wine on Apple Silicon. Its maintainer stopped active development and archived the GitHub repository on 9 April 2025. The maintenance notice says Whisky won't move to Wine 8 or later and won't get fixes for specific apps or games, Steam included.

Existing installations may keep working for a while, but nothing new will be fixed, and newer games increasingly need a newer Wine. A community fork, frankea/Whisky, continues development independently.

How Vermut differs from Whisky

• Built around game stores. Whisky gave you empty bottles; Vermut gives each store its own bottle, installs the official Steam client and handles Epic Games through Legendary (beta), with a Library for installed games.
• A current engine. Vermut downloads Wine 11, with DXMT for DirectX 10 and 11 on Metal by default, and Wine Staging and Wine Devel as fallbacks.
• The same choice of graphics backends: DXMT, DXVK with MoltenVK, WineD3D, and D3DMetal if you installed Apple's Game Porting Toolkit.
• Run any Windows .exe, .msi or .bat inside a bottle when a game isn't on a supported store.
• Free and MIT-licensed, with no account and no telemetry.

Move from Whisky to Vermut

1. 1

   Note what you play

   Make a list of your games and the settings that worked in Whisky. Steam and Epic keep your library and cloud saves on their servers.

2. 2

   Back up local saves

   Some games keep saves only inside the Whisky bottle. Copy them before you change anything. Vermut can't import Whisky bottles.

3. 3

   Install Vermut

   Download it from GitHub and allow it once in Privacy & Security, using the first-launch guide.

4. 4

   Install your store

   Install Steam, or sign in to Epic Games, from the Stores page. Vermut downloads Wine and creates the bottle.

5. 5

   Reinstall your games

   Download your games again from the store client, then restore local saves if needed. Keep Whisky until everything works, then remove it.

Which one should you pick?

• You played Steam or Epic games in Whisky and want a free, maintained replacement: try Vermut first. It takes a few minutes and costs nothing.
• You have many custom bottles you don't want to rebuild: the community fork can import Whisky bottles. It's run by a different maintainer, so judge its updates on their own.
• You need a specific game to work, or want help when it doesn't: start CrossOver's 14-day trial and buy it if that game runs.
• You're a developer testing a DirectX 12 port: Apple's Game Porting Toolkit is the tool made for that.

Honest limits

• Games with kernel-level anti-cheat, such as Valorant, Fortnite and Call of Duty, won't run through Wine, and no Mac tool can change that. Check Are We Anti-Cheat Yet? before you buy.
• Vermut is young and run by a small team. It has no commercial support; bugs are handled through GitHub issues.
• No Wine front end makes a game faster than the Wine underneath. If a game failed in Whisky because of Wine, test it before you assume it will work elsewhere.