What we keep, and why.

When you subscribe for launch updates

We save the email address you enter, the time you subscribe, the signup source and the wording of your consent. We use this list only for Final Vintage launch updates. Subscribing does not send a welcome or confirmation email.

The list is stored privately in our Cloudflare database. It is visible only to Final Vintage staff and is not shared with wineries or sold. Resend may deliver launch updates when they are ready; it is not used to send a message when you sign up.

To limit automated signups, we keep a temporary, hashed network identifier in hourly buckets; we do not attach your IP address to your subscriber record. Expired buckets are removed on subsequent signup requests.

To unsubscribe or delete your address before launch, write to privacy@final-vintage.com. Any launch email will include an unsubscribe link. We keep your signup until you unsubscribe or the launch list is retired.

Who we are

Final Vintage runs the site at final-vintage.com and the intake service behind it at intake.final-vintage.com. “We” means Final Vintage; “you” means whoever is reading.

Final Vintage connects buyers with the final releases of wineries. We don’t sell, ship or take payment for wine. The winery does, and it keeps its own records of the sales it makes. This notice covers what Final Vintage holds. What a winery does with your details once it has them is governed by the winery’s own privacy policy.

When you visit

You can read every story without telling us who you are. Buyers have no accounts.

Cloudflare, our host, delivers each page. To send it and to keep the site safe from attack, it handles your IP address and the ordinary details every browser sends, such as its type and language. Like any host, it also keeps overall traffic figures.

The site sets no cookies of its own, and loads no analytics, advertising or third-party scripts. Your answer to the age question, where you ship and My Cellar are kept in your browser (section 08) and never reach us.

When you claim a case

A claim reserves one numbered case of a real house’s final release. The winery completes the sale.

• What we take: your name, your email address, your phone number if you give one, the state the case would ship to, and whether it’s a gift. We record the house, the case number and the time, and keep your IP address so we can limit how many cases one address can reserve in an hour.
• Why: to hold the case for you, and to put you in touch with the winery.
• Where it goes: to the house’s own winery (section 06). We send you one email confirming the reservation. The winery writes to you about the sale.

A claim on a demonstration house reserves nothing and sends nothing anywhere. It is remembered only in your browser, in My Cellar.

When you ask for an allocation

The Final Pallet is for restaurants, shops, distributors and serious cellars.

• What we take: the business or cellar, what kind of buyer you are, the state for delivery, the release, how many cases, your email address, a phone number if you add one, and a note. We keep your IP address to limit repeated requests.
• Why: a person at Final Vintage reads every request. If it goes forward, we email your details to the winery, and the winery confirms directly with you. Nothing is held or sold until the winery confirms.

A request on a demonstration house is not sent anywhere.

When you ask to hear if your state opens

When a winery hasn’t opened your state, you can leave your email address. We take the address, the state and the release, and hold on to your IP address so one address can’t ask too often.

We write to it twice: once to say we have it, and once the day the winery opens your state. Both emails carry a link that forgets your address. It isn’t a mailing list, and we don’t pass the address to the winery.

What the winery sees

The winery is the seller of record. It takes payment, verifies your age, handles the taxes and compliance, and ships. It needs to reach you to do that, so:

• for a claim, the winery receives your name, email, phone if given, shipping state and gift choice, by email and on its Cellar Door, the winery’s own signed-in page;
• when we forward a Final Pallet request, the winery receives what you put in it.

Only the winery that owns the house sees these details. No public page shows them, and no other winery ever sees them. The winery keeps its own copy as the seller, under its own privacy policy.

When you’re a winery

The intake at /for-wineries gathers what we need to draft your page, verify your release and publish it once you approve.

What the intake takes

• The door: your website, your name, your email, your phone if you give one, your role, and your word that you’re authorized to speak for the winery. When you send, we record that attestation with the time and your IP address. We also keep the IP address that starts an intake, to limit how many one address can start in an hour.
• The house: its name, legal name, region, address, permit or license number, what is ending, and when it was founded and last bottled.
• The last release: each wine and its label facts, the cases remaining, your price and any cut, when the release closes, where the cases are, how buyers complete a purchase with you, your ship-to states and shipping estimate, and whether buyers should hear when a case ships.
• Your website: if you give us its address, our reader visits up to eight pages of your public site, follows your robots.txt, and keeps their words and the addresses of their images with your intake. We use only what you tick. The images it finds are shown to you straight from your own site.
• The five answers: typed, recorded or uploaded. A recording uses your camera and microphone only when you press Record, after your browser asks you, and runs two minutes at most. Someone at Final Vintage may transcribe it.
• Your files: logos, photographs, tech sheets, label art, back-label photographs and videos. We keep them as you sent them, including any details your camera wrote into them, such as where a photograph was taken.
• The preview and your okay: the notes you leave on the draft, and your approval — your name, your role, the version of the plain terms you acknowledged, and when and from which IP address you approved. We note when the preview link is first opened.
• The Cellar Door: the address a sign-in link goes to, the sign-in and when it was last used, and each change you make there (counts, cut, states, shipping, claims), recorded in your house’s activity log.
• Anything you write to us, in the intake’s notes or by email.

Saved as you go

What you type is saved to our database screen by screen, from the moment you choose “Join with a link”. That happens before you send, so the desk can see an intake that hasn’t been sent.

How we draft your page

Anthropic’s Claude models read your materials and draft the page (section 09). When they look through your photographs, they count the faces and note whether one is likely yours, so we never put a name to a face we can’t be sure of. They never make pictures. A person reads every draft. Nothing is public until you approve the page and we finish the Verified Final Release check.

What becomes public

Only the page you approve:

• the house’s name and region;
• the name of the person telling the story (yours, unless you tell us otherwise);
• the five answers and the quote;
• the photographs and any film we chose;
• the wine and its facts, your price and cut, and the close date;
• the states you ship to, and your shipping estimate;
• the route a buyer takes to buy from you;
• the Verified Final Release mark, once the check is done.

Your answers also appear on The Five Questions. The page stays in the archive after the last case goes (Sold Out — Story Preserved). Photographs and film are re-cut for the site with their camera details removed, and any film is cut without sound. Your email address, phone, address, legal name, permit number, tech sheets, notes and attestation are never published.

What stays in your browser

The site keeps a few things in your browser’s local storage, so it can remember you without an account. They stay on your device. Two of them are keys, which go to our intake service only to show that a draft or a sign-in is yours.

fv.age

That you said you’re 21 or older.

Everyone

fv.state

Your shipping state.

Everyone

fv.cellar

My Cellar: the houses and case numbers you claimed on this device.

Buyers

fv.gifts

Which of those cases you marked as a gift.

Buyers

fv.intake.v1

The key to your intake and what you’ve typed, so you can close the page and come back. Once you send, only its receipt stays: the intake’s number and when it went.

Wineries

fv.cellar.v1

Your Cellar Door sign-in. Signing out removes it.

Wineries

A preview link carries its key in its own address, and nothing is stored for it. Clearing this site’s data in your browser removes everything above. The only cookie we set anywhere belongs to the desk, where Final Vintage staff review intakes, and it is set only for staff.

Who helps us

Three companies process what you send. They do it for us, and only to run Final Vintage.

• Cloudflare hosts the site and the intake service: the database that holds intakes, claims and requests; the private storage that holds wineries’ files; and the queue that schedules the drafting. It handles every request, and keeps logs of requests to the intake service — which can include the address you asked for and your IP address — for no more than a week.
• Resend sends our email, from send.final-vintage.com. It handles each message’s address, subject and words. When a claim or a Final Pallet request goes to a winery, that includes the buyer’s details.
• Anthropic reads a winery’s materials through its API and returns a draft of the page. It receives the house’s facts, including its legal name; the contact’s name and role; the wines; the typed answers and any transcripts; the website pages the winery ticked, and the intake’s notes; and the tech sheets, back-label photographs, photographs, logo and label art. It fetches the website images the winery ticked from the winery’s own site. We don’t send it the contact email or phone from the intake, the winery’s address or permit number, any video, or anything about buyers. Anthropic’s commercial terms don’t allow it to train its models on what we send.

A summary of each intake a winery sends, each approval, and each change a winery asks for is also emailed to Final Vintage’s own inbox. Replies to our email reach a person there.

We share what you send with no one else, unless the law requires us to. If Final Vintage itself ever changes hands, what we hold would pass to whoever carries it on, and this notice would still apply to it.

What we never do

• Sell your information, or trade it.
• Show you advertising, or share your details with anyone for their own marketing.
• Put analytics, tracking pixels or third-party scripts on the site.
• Follow you across other sites. Because we don’t track, a Do Not Track signal changes nothing here: every visit is treated the same way.
• Ask for your card or bank details. You pay the winery for wine, never us.
• Use a buyer’s details for anything except the claim or request they made.

How long we keep it

We keep what you send while the release it belongs to is open, and while its story is in the archive. Nothing is deleted on a schedule yet. Anything is deleted when you ask (section 12). Sign-in links stop working after seven days and preview links after fourteen, but their records stay.

Three things we don’t set ourselves:

• Cloudflare’s request logs last a week at most.
• Our database keeps a rolling backup. A deleted record could be restored from it for up to 30 days, and after that it’s gone.
• Our email provider keeps its own record of the mail it has sent, under its own terms.

Seeing, correcting and deleting yours

Write to us at privacy@final-vintage.com. You can ask for a copy of what we hold about you, a correction, or deletion. We’ll make sure the request is yours, usually by writing back to the email address we have.

• Wineries can correct most things themselves: leave a note on the preview, change counts, cut, states and shipping at the Cellar Door, or ask for a change there.
• Deleting an intake removes everything tied to it: the intake, its files, drafts, preview links and approval, its notes, the claims and requests made on its house, its Cellar Door sign-ins, its live counts and its activity log. What stays is a line recording the deletion.
• A page that’s already live comes down when we remove it, with its photographs and film, from the site and publish again.
• Buyers: ask, and we erase your details from your claim. The winery holds its own record as the seller, so ask it too.
• “Email me if it opens”: use the link in that email, or write to us.

Age

Final Vintage is for people 21 and older. The coming-soon signup collects an email address and does not verify age. We don’t knowingly collect anything from anyone under 21. If you think someone under 21 has sent us their details, tell us and we’ll delete them. The winery verifies age before it completes any sale.

Keeping it safe

• Wineries’ files are held in private storage. They can be reached only through routes that check a key: the desk’s, the winery’s preview link, or the one our publishing uses.
• The keys to intakes, preview links and Cellar Door sign-ins are stored only as one-way hashes, so our database never holds a key that works.
• Everything you send us travels over HTTPS.
• The desk, where a person reviews intakes and claims, is behind a staff key.
• We hold no card or bank details, because we never take payment.

No system is perfectly secure, and we won’t claim ours is. If something goes wrong that affects your information, we’ll tell you.

If you live in California

We post this notice under California’s online privacy law. You can ask to see the personal information we hold and have it deleted, as section 12 says. We don’t sell it, and we don’t share it for advertising or for anyone else’s marketing.

Changes

When this notice changes, we’ll post the new version here with its date. If a change affects what we do with information you’ve already given us, we’ll say so at the top of this page for 30 days before it takes effect.

Contact

Final Vintage · privacy@final-vintage.com