Privacy Notice

1. Who we are

The Vine-Letter is published by Matthew Henniker-Gotley, United Kingdom — the data controller for the personal data described here. Contact: hello@thevineletter.co.uk.

2. What we collect

• Email address — to deliver the newsletter and manage your account.
• Subscription records — your subscription status, member number, join date, referral code, and who (if anyone) referred you.
• Payment data — handled entirely by Stripe, our payment processor. We never see or store your card details; we hold only Stripe's reference identifiers for your customer and subscription.
• Email engagement — our email provider records deliveries, opens, and clicks, which we use to maintain deliverability and improve the letter.
• My Cellar — if you use it: the wines you log, how many bottles, what you paid, where you keep them (as you describe it), your ratings and notes, and photos of wine labels you take. Label photos are sent to Anthropic, whose AI model reads the label for us; they are stored privately and shown only to you.

We do not collect names, addresses, or any special-category data, and the service is not directed at anyone under 18.

3. Why we process it (legal bases)

• Performance of a contract — delivering the newsletter you subscribed to, billing, and operating the referral scheme.
• Legitimate interests — service emails about your account, measuring engagement, preventing fraud and abuse of the referral scheme.
• Legal obligation — retaining billing records for tax and accounting purposes.

4. Who processes it for us

We use a small number of established providers to run the service, each processing data on our instructions:

• Stripe — payments and subscription billing
• MailerLite — sending the newsletter and managing the subscriber list
• Supabase — our subscriber database
• Netlify — hosting the website and signup service
• Google — measuring our advertising (Google Ads), only with your cookie consent
• CookieYes — recording your cookie choices
• MailerSend — account emails such as sign-in links and alerts
• Anthropic — reading wine-label photos for My Cellar (under its commercial terms, it does not use them to train its models)

Some providers process data outside the UK/EEA; where they do, transfers are protected by recognised safeguards such as the UK Extension to the EU–US Data Privacy Framework or standard contractual clauses. We do not sell personal data, and we do not share it with wine merchants.

5. How long we keep it

Subscriber data is kept while your subscription is active. If you unsubscribe or cancel, we suppress your email address from mailings and delete or anonymise your subscriber record within [12] months, except billing records, which we retain for six years as required for tax purposes. You can delete any wine from My Cellar yourself, which also deletes its photo; your whole cellar is deleted with your subscriber record.

6. Your rights

Under UK data protection law you may request access to, correction of, or deletion of your personal data; object to or restrict processing; and receive your data in a portable format. Write to hello@thevineletter.co.uk and we will respond within one month. You may also complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.

7. Cookies

Essential cookies may be set by Stripe during checkout to process your payment securely, and by our consent banner to remember your choice. If a referral link brought you here, the referral code is read from the link itself when you subscribe.

With your consent, we also use Google Ads cookies to measure whether our advertisements lead to subscriptions. These are set only if you accept them in the cookie banner; if you decline, Google receives no advertising cookies from our site. You can change your choice at any time using the cookie settings link on the site.

8. Changes

We may update this notice from time to time; material changes will be flagged in the newsletter. The latest version always lives at this address.