Privacy

Feeling Vine does not ask you for personal information, and does not track you. There are no accounts, no advertising, no tracking pixels and no third-party analytics on this site.

We do measure how our tools are used. For Discover, we keep anonymous running totals only. For Find a Bottle, we record the steps of a single questionnaire journey: which question was shown, which answer was chosen, whether we found bottles, and whether you followed a link to a shop. We link those steps together with a random journey number.

That journey number is held only in the page's memory while you are on the questionnaire. It is destroyed as soon as you leave that page, reload it, close the tab or start again, and it is never reused. It is not stored on your device, and it is never linked to an account, an email address, your IP address or any device fingerprint. Feeling Vine stores nothing of its own in your browser, and we still do not know who you are.

We do not run third-party analytics, measurement or tag scripts. We do not set advertising or tracking cookies. We do not store anything in your browser's local or session storage on the public pages of the site, and we do not give you a visitor or device identifier that follows you between visits or between pages.

There are no reader accounts, so there is nothing to sign up for and no profile of you. The only email address we collect is one you choose to give us to be sent a Find a Bottle result, described below. There is no contact form, so no submissions are stored. There are no public ratings or comments, no retailer monetisation and no advertising system.

At the end of Find a Bottle you can ask us to email you the bottles we found. If you do, we keep: your email address; a copy of what we sent (the wines, prices, shops and the date we checked them); when we sent it and whether it was delivered; that you confirmed you are 18 or over; and where you asked from (the Find a Bottle result). If you also tick the box for the weekly list, we keep that you agreed, the exact wording you agreed to and when, and a private code used to let you leave.

Why and on what basis: we use your address to send the one email you asked for, because you asked us to (legitimate interests in answering your request). We only send the weekly list if you tick the box and then confirm by clicking the link in a second email; that is based on your consent, which you can withdraw at any time. The result email contains no marketing.

This is kept completely separate from our measurement. The email records do not contain the random journey number described below, or any other analytics or session identifier, and the two cannot be joined. Our dashboard only counts how many emails were requested and how many people confirmed the list; it never shows who.

How long we keep it: if you only asked for your result, we delete the record 30 days after sending. If you asked for the weekly list but never confirmed, we delete it after 30 days. If you joined the list, we keep your address until you leave, and delete it within 30 days of you leaving.

Leaving: every weekly-list email has a one-click unsubscribe link, and so does the confirmation email. To have your details deleted, or to ask what we hold, email hello@feelingvine.co.uk. If you leave the list, complain about an email, or ask us to delete your details, we delete your records but keep a scrambled one-way code made from your address, with the date and the reason, so we never email you again by mistake. The code cannot be turned back into your address, and we keep it for as long as we send email.

We send email through Resend, an email delivery service, which processes your address to deliver the message. We do not use open tracking, click tracking or tracking pixels in these emails.

Find a Bottle is the short questionnaire that ends in up to three bottles. To see where it works and where it fails people, we record the journey through it: the questionnaire started, each question shown, each answer chosen from our own published options, an answer changed, a step taken back, the questionnaire finished, whether we found bottles or honestly found none, which bottles were shown in which position, and whether a link to a shop was followed.

So that these steps can be read as one journey rather than as unrelated fragments, each journey is given a random number when it begins. It exists only in the memory of the page you are on: it is never written to your device, and it is destroyed the moment you leave the questionnaire, reload it, close the tab or start again. It is not a visitor identifier: two visits are simply two unrelated numbers, and there is no way to join them. It is not connected to an account, an email address, your IP address, your user-agent string or any device fingerprint, because we do not record those against it.

Only our own published values are recorded: the wine type, style, occasion, gift recipient, budget band and adventure level you picked from our buttons, the position of a bottle in the results, the shop's name and a broad price band. We never record free text, the full address of the page or your search terms, and we never record the internal workings behind a recommendation. When you follow a shop link, the page hands back a sealed code that only our server can open; we then record which bottle and which shop it stood for, and the code itself is discarded rather than kept.

We also record which version of our recommendation engine and which catalogue produced the bottles you were shown, so that our own evidence can be judged honestly. The time is recorded by our server. Our own editorial sessions, local development and obvious automated crawlers are never counted. Traffic on our preview site is recorded and clearly labelled as preview, and it is kept out of the evidence we judge the live product by.

These journey records are kept for 90 days and then deleted automatically, by a daily clean-up job. Nothing here changes what you are recommended: if the measurement fails, the questionnaire and the results carry on exactly as normal.

Discover is the part of the site where you can start from a feeling, from something you already like, or ask us to surprise you. To know whether it is actually working, we keep anonymous running totals of how it is used: which feelings and which starting points are chosen, how often we find directions, and how often we honestly find none.

These are totals, not records. Each count is added to a shared daily tally, so there is nothing in it that describes a person or a visit. There is no visitor identifier, no session identifier, no cookie, no device fingerprint and no account linkage: none is stored or created in the first place. Because no individual events exist, there is nothing about you that could be pulled back out of the totals.

We never record what you type. If you tell Discover a wine, grape, region or style, your words are resolved into one of our published starting points before anything is counted, and only that published name is counted. If we do not recognise what you typed, all we count is that one attempt was not recognised, never the text, its length, or anything derived from it.

We also do not record the workings behind a recommendation, and we do not record your IP address, your browser's user-agent string, your referrer or the full address of the page you were on.

The tallies are kept by day and no finer. We do not record the time of day anything happened, so a quiet day cannot reveal when a single visit took place.

We keep these anonymous totals for up to 24 months, so we can see how Discover changes across a year, and then they are deleted automatically by a scheduled job rather than by hand.

Your Taste Profile answers are held only in the address of the page you are on, so that your place in the questionnaire survives a refresh or a shared link. They are not sent to us as a record, not attached to you and not stored after you leave.

Search terms are used to look up published articles and profiles in our editorial database while you wait for the results. We do not keep a log of what you searched for.

Like any website, Feeling Vine reaches you through hosting, delivery and security infrastructure that necessarily sees the technical details of each request, such as your IP address, the page requested and your browser's user-agent string, and may retain them briefly in operational logs for security and reliability. We do not use that information to identify or profile readers.

Our editorial content, and the measurement described above, are held in hosted database services. Those requests are made by our server, not by your browser, and carry no information about you.

The site loads its typefaces from Google Fonts, which means your browser makes a request to Google's font servers and Google receives that request. Apart from that, the public pages embed no third-party content, players or widgets.

Beyond that, the site depends on the infrastructure providers that serve and protect it and on the hosted database services that store our writing and our measurement. They process the requests and data needed to operate those services.

Feeling Vine does not set advertising or profiling cookies on public pages. Our hosting and security layer may set a short-lived security cookie to protect the site from automated abuse.

Cookies we set ourselves are used only for the private editorial sign-in used by the desk, which readers never encounter.

This notice describes the site as it is today. As features such as the newsletter go live, it will be updated before they do.