How we use data

Updated September 3, 2026 · A living list; the status tag says where each source stands

A verdict needs two things: a profile of the wine, and a profile of you. Yours is built from your own ratings and never leaves your phone. The wine side comes from the sources below. We only use sources we are allowed to use, we write the license down beside each one, and we credit them here.

Status tags: in the app means it feeds verdicts today. in our data lake means we hold it and have not wired it in yet. requested means we have asked and are waiting.

Wine identity and attributes

Tasting notes

Wine Enthusiast tasting notes derived signals in the app Published tasting notes reduced to numbers: sweetness, body, acidity, and dominant flavor descriptors. No review text, score, or excerpt is stored in the app, shown to you, or shipped with it; only the derived numbers are. We have asked Wine Enthusiast for a direct content license and will credit them by name in the app once it is in place.

Derived signals only · no review text reproduced · direct license requested September 2026

Wine catalog

X-Wines in the app A research dataset of about 100,000 wines used for wine identity and grape-variety priors. Azambuja, Morais, and Filipe, "X-Wines: A Wine Dataset for Recommender Systems and Machine Learning," Big Data and Cognitive Computing, 2023.

CC0 1.0 public-domain dedication (repository LICENSE) · cited as the authors request

Chemistry

UCI Wine Quality in our data lake Measured sugar, acid, and alcohol for Portuguese Vinho Verde samples, useful as priors for what a style tastes like.

CC BY 4.0 · Cortez et al., UCI Machine Learning Repository

Barcodes

Open Food Facts in our data lake Barcode to product-name lookup for scanning a bottle's UPC. Kept as a lookup table, not merged into our catalog, so the share-alike license is honored.

Open Database License (ODbL) · used as a lookup only

Label approvals

TTB Public COLA Registry requested United States federal label-approval records: brand, class, origin, varietal, vintage. Public record. We have asked the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau for a bulk extract rather than reading the site page by page.

Public record · bulk extract requested September 3, 2026

Producers and regions

Wikidata in our data lake Wineries, appellations, and grape varieties as an open knowledge graph.

CC0 1.0

Retail partners

None yet. When echoVin links to a place that sells a wine, the retailer will be named here and on the link itself, and any product data from them will be used under a written agreement with them.

Your ratings

Yours. They stay on your device, they are not uploaded, and they are not used to train anything.

The engine

The palate model, the matching, and the scoring are ours. The photo reader is Anthropic's Claude, which reads text off a label; it does not judge the wine. Details on what a scan sends are in the privacy policy.

What we don't use

Nothing gathered from behind a login, a paywall, or a bot check.
No crowd-review platforms' data. An early experiment with one such source was retired and is not part of the app.
No source whose license we can't quote here.

If you are a data owner and believe something on this page is wrong, write to hello@echovinapp.com. A founder answers.