Terms of use

Who publishes this

WineHQ is published by HEKNO LTD, company number SC895711, registered office Borthwick Farm Cottage, Gorebridge, EH23 4QZ, United Kingdom. Registered in Scotland, and these terms are governed by the laws of Scotland.

They sit under HEKNO’s central terms of use, which state that individual HEKNO products may publish their own.

What this site is for

WineHQ is an educational reference about wine. It describes grapes, styles, regions, processes and faults, and provides tools that perform arithmetic and structured recommendation. It is not a shop, a valuation service, a laboratory, or a source of professional advice of any kind.

Limits of the content

• Descriptions are of styles, not bottles. Individual producers, vintages and sites vary enormously. A taste profile describes a category’s typical range, and an individual bottle can sit outside it.
• Tools are estimators. Every calculator states its assumptions and the point at which it stops being reliable. Those statements are part of the answer and should be read as such — particularly the chilling estimator, which is a calibrated rule of thumb rather than a thermodynamic model.
• The fault troubleshooter is not a diagnosis. It ranks possibilities from the symptoms you select. Several faults share symptoms, and your own nose is the better instrument.
• Regulations change. Appellation rules, labelling requirements and official statistics are checked against their sources on a date, and that date is recorded. Anything time-sensitive should be verified against the regulator before you rely on it commercially.
• Nothing here is health advice. See the alcohol and health policy. Questions about your own drinking belong with a clinician.

Using WineHQ's material

Read it, learn from it, quote it with attribution and link to it freely. What is not welcome is wholesale reproduction of the datasets or bulk automated extraction dressed up as someone else’s reference work — the structure and the explanations are the thing that took the effort, and copying them is not the same as citing them.

Where WineHQ cites an external authority, that material belongs to its publisher. WineHQ extracts facts and writes its own explanations; it does not reproduce source text, critic reviews, proprietary tasting notes, commercial databases or copyrighted maps and photography.

Age

This site is about an alcoholic drink and is intended for people old enough to buy one where they live. Nothing on it is designed to appeal to anyone under that age.

External links

Source links point at regulators, trade bodies and reference publishers. They are marked as citations rather than endorsements, and WineHQ is not responsible for what those sites say or do. See the source register.

Changes

These terms describe the site as built and will be revised when its behaviour changes. They are not versioned on a schedule for its own sake.