Legal

Privacy policy

Last updated 2 October 2026

This policy explains what personal information Vine Culture collects about you, why we collect it, who else receives it, how long we keep it, and what you can require us to do with it. If anything in it is unclear, contact us using the details below.

Who we are

Vine Culture is a site for finding English and Welsh wineries, planning visits to them, and keeping a record of the ones you have been to. It is operated by Vine Culture Ltd, which is the data controller for the information described here.

Vine Culture Ltd is a private limited company registered in England and Wales, company number 17474154. Its registered office is 71–75 Shelton Street, Covent Garden, London WC2H 9JQ. It is registered with the Information Commissioner’s Office as a data controller, registration number ZC260910.

For anything to do with this policy, or to exercise any of the rights below, email hello@vineculture.co.uk.

What we collect

Your account. Your email address, and a display name. If you set a password it is stored as a cryptographic hash by our authentication provider and is never visible to us. If you sign in with Google instead, Google tells us your name, your email address and your profile picture, and nothing else.

Your profile.The county you say you are based in, what brings you to Vine Culture (planning a day out, working your way round the wineries, and so on), the wine styles you say you prefer, your notification preferences, and the dates on which you confirmed you were 18 or over and accepted our terms. We ask for your county and what brings you here when you first sign in; you can answer “prefer not to say” to either.

What you record. The records you create while using the site:

Wineries you favourite, and events you save
Visits you log — the date, how many bottles you bought, and any private notes you write about the visit
Ratings you give a winery, and any written review you add
Tasting notes about individual wines
Trips you build — their titles, dates, the wineries and places to stay in them, any notes you add to a stop, and any rating you give a trip afterwards
Email addresses you type in to invite somebody to a trip, or to send them a copy of one. We use those addresses to send that email and for nothing else

If you invite someone to join a trip and they accept, the people on that trip see each other’s display names, never each other’s email addresses. They can see the trip’s plan; they cannot see your notes or your rating, and you cannot see theirs.

If you share a trip by link, anyone with the link can see its stops, its route and the places you added to it, for 30 days. Your name, the trip’s title and date, your notes and any accommodation you found through our accommodation search are not shown.

Every trip email has a “Don’t send me these again” link. If someone uses it, we keep a scrambled (hashed) form of their address, which cannot be turned back into the address, so that we never email it about trips again. We keep this record for as long as we operate the service, so that we can continue to honour the request.

The private notes you write about a visit, and the notes you add to a stop on a saved trip, are encrypted before they are stored. Our database, its backups and our administration tools hold only the encrypted form, and we do not read them. The site decrypts them only to show them to you when you are signed in, and in the copy of your data you can download. Your ratings, written reviews and tasting notes are not encrypted in this way.

Your scores are combined into the average rating shown on a winery’s page. If you rate a trip you started from one of our curated trips, your score is also combined into that curated trip’s rating, and your trip is counted, without your name, among the people who have saved it or been on it. A written review of a winery or a trip is labelled “Public review” and is stored so that it can be shown alongside that winery or trip, but it is not displayed anywhere on the site today. If we start showing reviews, they will appear without your name attached.

Messages you send us. If you use the form on our Contact, For wineries or Partnerships page, we store your message with the name and email address on your account, and anything else you fill in — the winery it is about, your role, a phone number, your organisation and its website. You have to be signed in to send one. We use it to reply to you and for nothing else, and only we can read it. The legal basis is our legitimate interest in answering the people who write to us.

Your location, if you offer it.Some parts of the site have a “Near me” button. If you press it, your browser will ask your permission and then give us your approximate position. It is held in your browser’s session storage for the tab you are using and is removed when you close it. It is never saved to your account and never stored on our servers. If you decline, the rest of the site continues to work and you can search by place name instead.

Technical information. Our hosting provider keeps standard server logs, which include IP addresses, in order to serve the site and protect it from abuse. When you subscribe to the newsletter we store a salted one-way hash of your IP address — not the address itself — to prevent abuse of the form.

Error records.When a page is not found or something on the site fails, we record the page address (without anything after a “?”), the name of the website you arrived from (not the page), whether the request looked automated, and a description of the error with any email addresses, numbers and identifiers removed. We do not record your IP address, your account or anything else that identifies you. The legal basis is our legitimate interest in keeping the site working. These records are kept for 90 days.

Why we use it, and our legal basis

To give you what you asked for — running your account, saving your trips, showing your own record back to you. The legal basis is performance of a contract with you.
To keep the site working and honest — preventing abuse, rate-limiting forms, fixing faults, and calculating the average ratings shown on winery pages. The legal basis is our legitimate interests in running a service that works and is not trivially abused.
To suggest things that suit you — your county and what brings you to Vine Culture shape which wineries and articles we suggest, and help us understand who uses the site so we build the right things. The legal basis is our legitimate interests in making the site useful to you.
To send you things you opted into — the newsletter, and optional emails such as trip reminders. The legal basis is your consent, and you can withdraw it at any time in your settings or by emailing us.
To meet legal obligations, where we have them.

We do not sell your information, we do not share it with advertisers, and we do not use it to build a profile of you for anybody else’s purposes.

Who else sees it

We use a small number of companies to run the site. They process information on our instructions, under their standard data protection terms.

Supabase — our database and sign-in. Your account and everything you record is held here, in their London region.
Vercel— hosting. They serve the site, keep the server logs described above, and measure how quickly our pages load (the page address, load times, and the type of device and browser). The site’s servers run in their London region.
Cloudflare — the check on our sign-in, sign-up, password reset and newsletter forms that stops automated abuse. Your browser connects to Cloudflare for it, so Cloudflare receives your IP address and information about your browser and device.
Google — only if you choose to sign in with Google.
Mapbox — the maps. Your browser loads map tiles from them directly, which means they receive your IP address whenever you use a map.
Stay22 — accommodation search in the trip planner. These requests are made by our server rather than your browser, so Stay22 does not receive your IP address. We send them the area being searched and the dates, and nothing about you.
beehiiv — the newsletter, if you subscribe to it.
Resend— sends our emails: the welcome email, trip reminders, and the invitations and trip copies you ask us to send to someone else. They receive the recipient’s address and the email itself.

Emails about your account — confirming your address, resetting your password — are sent through our authentication provider. We may also be required to disclose information if the law obliges us to, and we would tell you unless we were prohibited from doing so.

Where it is kept

The database holding your account and your records is in the United Kingdom (London). Some of the providers above are based outside the UK, and where that is the case we rely on the data protection terms in their standard agreements, which are designed to give your information equivalent protection.

Cookies and browser storage

We use no analytics, advertising or tracking cookies. Nothing here follows you between sites. Because we set only the strictly necessary cookies described below, we do not ask for cookie consent.

We count visits ourselves, without cookies.When you open a page, view a winery’s profile or follow a link to a winery’s website, booking page or listing, our server records which page or link it was, where on our site you clicked it, and which site you arrived from. Nothing is stored on your device for this. To tell different visitors apart within a single day, our server combines your IP address and browser type with a secret that changes every day and is then deleted, and keeps only the scrambled result: it cannot be turned back into your IP address, and it cannot connect your visits on different days. We keep these records for 13 months, after which only weekly totals remain. We do this because we have a legitimate interest in understanding how the site is used and in showing wineries how many visitors we send them.

What we do use is strictly necessary and falls into two kinds. Our authentication provider sets cookies that keep you signed in. And we use your browser’s own local and session storage to remember small things between visits: a trip you are part-way through building, the last part of the map you were looking at, whether you have dismissed a prompt, and your position if you used “Near me”. That information stays on your device and is not sent to us.

You can clear all of it at any time through your browser’s settings. Clearing it will sign you out and discard any unsaved trip.

How long we keep it

We keep your account and what you have recorded for as long as your account is open. If you ask us to delete it, we will, as described below.

When your account is deleted, everything connected to it is deleted with it: your profile, visits and notes, tasting notes, favourites, saved events, the trips you built and anything in them, the email addresses of anyone you invited, any messages you sent us through the site, and your newsletter subscription, including with our newsletter provider.

If other people joined a trip you organised, each of them keeps their own copy of it, with their own notes. Their copy does not carry your name.

Ratings are an exception. The star scores of any rating you gave a winery or a trip are kept, detached from you, and continue to count towards averages. Anything you wrote with them — your review, the date of your visit and whether you would go back — is deleted. After that the scores are not connected to you or to your account in any way.

Error records, which do not identify anyone, are deleted after 90 days.

People named in winery listings

Our winery listings include details that each winery publishes about itself, such as a telephone number, an email address, and the names and roles of people who own or work at it. Where a winery is run by an individual or a partnership, or a contact detail belongs to a named person, this is personal information.

We collect it from the winery’s own website and from information the winery sends us. We use it to help visitors find and contact the winery. The legal basis is our legitimate interest in providing an accurate guide to wineries that are open to visitors. We show only details the winery has published for the public to use, we correct them when we learn they have changed, and we keep them for as long as the winery is listed.

If you would like a detail about you corrected or removed, email hello@vineculture.co.uk and we will do so.

Your rights

Under UK data protection law you have the right to:

Ask what we hold about you, and get a copy of it
Have anything inaccurate corrected
Have it deleted
Ask us to restrict how we use it, or object to our using it
Receive it in a portable form, or have it sent to somebody else
Withdraw consent you have given, at any time

To get a copy of your data, use Download my datain your account’s Settings: it gives you everything we hold about your account as a file, straight away. For anything else on this list — including deleting your account — email hello@vineculture.co.uk from the address you signed up with, and we will action it by hand. We will respond within one month, or tell you within that month if a complex request needs longer, as the law allows. There is no charge, and you do not have to give a reason.

Age

Vine Culture is about visiting wineries and drinking wine, and it is for adults. You must confirm you are 18 or over to create an account. We do not knowingly collect information about anybody under 18, and if we find that we have, we will delete it.

Changes to this policy

When we change this page we will change the date at the top. If we ever change it in a way that materially affects you, we will tell you directly rather than relying on you noticing.

Complaints

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, please contact us first at hello@vineculture.co.uk and we will try to put it right. You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office, the UK regulator, at ico.org.uk.