Terms of service

Last updated: 2026-05-21

Plain-English version: WineTone is a research prototype, free to use, comes with zero warranty, and the operator (me@archisgore.com) reserves the right to remove content or ban accounts that abuse the service. By using the site you accept these terms.

1. The service

"WineTone" refers to the website at tone.wine, its source code at github.com/archisgore/WineTone, and the data artifacts published on Hugging Face Hub. The service is operated as a research demonstration and may change, degrade, or shut down at any time without notice.

2. Eligibility

WineTone is about wine. Don't use it if you're under the legal drinking age in your jurisdiction. We don't verify ages — you represent that you are of legal drinking age when you sign in.

3. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• Submit content that's spam, hate speech, doxxing, or otherwise illegal in your jurisdiction.
• Scrape the site programmatically beyond the rate limits we publish. Use the data tarball releases instead — that's why they exist.
• Attempt to break, deface, or take down the site (DoS, injection, prompt-injection-into-the-LLM-router, etc.).
• Submit content claiming to come from another person or entity, including impersonating a wine producer.
• Submit copyrighted text that you don't have rights to redistribute. Wine review text we use comes from publicly available review aggregators and is treated under fair-use research exemption.

Violation may result in content removal, account suspension, or permanent ban — at the operator's discretion, without notice or appeal. The operator's contact for disputes is me@archisgore.com.

4. Your content

You retain ownership of any content you submit (labels, wine submissions, profile data). By submitting, you grant the operator a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free license to display, redistribute, embed, and incorporate that content into WineTone's public data releases, research papers, blog posts, and derivative works.

Specifically: your wine labels become part of the public corpus and may appear in research papers, downloadable data tarballs on GitHub, and the Hugging Face model fine-tuning sets. If you don't want your descriptions in those places, don't post them — see the privacy banner at the top of every page.

Wine submissions you make ("Add a wine") become part of the catalog permanently. Even if you later delete your account, those catalog entries remain (as attribution-less rows indistinguishable from pipeline-imported wines) because removing them would break recommendations for everyone calibrated against them. To request removal of a specific wine, email the operator.

5. No warranty

WineTone is provided as is, with no warranty of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. Wine recommendations are algorithmic guesses; they may be wrong, weird, or off-putting. We're not sommeliers and the service does not provide professional advice.

In no event shall the operator be liable for any claim, damages, or other liability arising from the use of the service.

6. Third parties

WineTone runs on infrastructure provided by Hugging Face (compute), Neon (database), Cloudflare (DNS), and Clerk (authentication). Each has its own terms; your use of WineTone constitutes acceptance of theirs too in the limited ways they're invoked. Their privacy policies and terms govern how they handle your data — see our privacy policy for pointers.

7. Termination

You may terminate your account at any time via the "Delete my account permanently" button on your dashboard. We may terminate yours for any of the reasons in §3 above, or for any other reason consistent with these terms.

8. Changes

These terms may change. When they do, the date at the top updates and a note appears in the release notes. Continued use of the service after a change constitutes acceptance of the revised terms.

9. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of Washington State, USA, without regard to its conflict-of-laws provisions. Disputes will be resolved in the state and federal courts located in King County, Washington.

10. Contact

Email me@archisgore.com or open an issue at github.com/archisgore/WineTone/issues.