About VinSip

Why a directory and an app share one site

The two halves of VinSip answer the two halves of the same question. The app answers "what is this bottle in front of me", which is a recognition problem. The directory answers "where do I go to find a bottle worth having", which is a geography and opening-hours problem. Most wine products pick one and pretend the other does not exist.

Keeping both in one place has one concrete consequence for this site: the venue pages have to be useful to somebody who never installs anything. That is why the hours, the ratings and the comparisons are on the page as text rather than behind a download prompt, and why the guides are written to be read rather than to funnel. A directory that is only a lead magnet is a directory nobody links to, and a wine site nobody links to does not get found.

The editorial section exists for the same reason. A person deciding between a Rioja and a Ribera del Duero is not looking for an app; they are looking for an answer. Publishing the answer, properly, is what earns the right to mention that we also make something.

How this directory is put together

Every venue on VinSip starts as a place record from the Google Places API, filtered to wine shops, wine bars, restaurants with a wine programme and wineries in the cities we cover. We keep the name, address, coordinates, phone, website, opening hours, price band, rating and review count exactly as the venue publishes them, and we do not edit them into something more flattering.

What we add on top is the arithmetic: the share of a city's venues that trade on Sunday, the median opening and closing time, the spread of ratings, how a city compares with its country. Those figures are computed at build time from the same rows the listing shows, so a number on the page can always be checked against the list underneath it.

Coverage is city-first and deliberately incomplete. We index cities where a specialist wine trade exists at a scale worth mapping, and inside those cities we list venues that publish enough public information to be described honestly. A city or a shop missing from the site is a gap in our coverage, not a judgement.

What is covered today, and what is missing

Coverage is six countries — France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, the United Kingdom and the United States — across the cities where a specialist wine trade exists at a scale worth mapping. Inside those cities the listing runs to wine shops, wine bars, restaurants with a real wine programme, and wineries or tasting rooms reachable from the city.

The obvious gaps are Italy, Argentina, Chile, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, all of which matter to wine and none of which is here yet. We would rather say that than publish a thin listing for a country and let it imply coverage we do not have. The same applies inside the countries we do cover: a city missing from a hub is a city we have not done, not a city without wine shops.

The editorial side is broader than the directory side, because a guide to reading a label or to what duty does to a price is useful wherever you are. The reference pages are written to hold in any market and to name the jurisdiction whenever a figure is jurisdiction-specific.

Where a listing is too short to describe a city honestly, the page still exists and is still linked from its country hub, but it is not offered to search engines. Padding a three-address page to look like a guide would be the dishonest fix.

How the editorial pages are written, and where AI sits in that

The wine guides and region pages are drafted with a large language model against a brief, then edited by a person before they are published. We say so plainly because a reference site that hides it is asking to be caught, and because it tells you what the failure mode is: a fluent sentence that is wrong. The edit exists to catch exactly that.

The rules the drafts are held to are the same ones a good reference page follows anywhere. A heading is the question somebody actually asks. The first sentences under it answer that question without pointing back at an earlier section, because a paragraph pulled out of a page has to work alone. A number appears in the same sentence as the body that publishes it, with a link. Where a fact is against our interest — that a rating does not measure the wine list, that the app misreads damaged labels — it goes in anyway.

The statistics on the directory pages are not written by a model at all. They are computed at build time from the venue rows, in code, so they cannot drift from the list shown underneath them. If a number here is wrong, the data is wrong, not the prose.

We do not publish tasting notes for wines we have not tasted, invent producer histories, or attach a score to a bottle. There is no rating of individual wines anywhere on this site, and that is deliberate: a hundred-point score with nothing behind it is the most common kind of wine content and the least worth reading.

How venues are ordered, and why the order is not for sale

The default order on a city page is rating first, then review volume. Both come from the venue's public profile, neither is adjustable, and there is no editorial thumb on the scale. A venue with 4.9 from eleven reviews sits below one with 4.7 from nine hundred, because the second number is evidence and the first is noise.

Filters change what is shown, not the order within it. Sorting by A–Z or by review count reorders the same set. Nothing is hidden behind a filter, and no listing is suppressed for a commercial reason — the only removals are closures and owner requests.

We have never sold placement and there is no mechanism in the codebase to do it. That is worth saying because most directories of this shape do sell it, and a reader who assumes we do would be right to discount everything above.

What this site does not do

VinSip does not sell wine, take bookings, or accept payment from venues for a listing or for a better position in one. There is no paid placement anywhere on this site, and no venue can buy its way up a ranking — the order is rating and review volume, computed, and nothing else.

The ratings are not ours. They are the public Google rating for the venue, which aggregates everything a visitor might comment on: service, the queue, the room, the parking. A high rating does not mean the wine selection is good, and we say so on every directory page rather than letting the star count imply an expertise it does not have.

Nothing here is advice about drinking. We publish where wine is sold and what the rules around selling it are; we do not publish health guidance, and the alcohol figures on this site are tax and labelling facts, not recommendations about consumption.

Quoting, citing and reusing what is here

Quote us. The figures on this site — Sunday trading shares, median closing times, rating distributions, duty rates with their sources — exist to be cited, in an article, a forum answer, a slide or a machine-generated answer. Attribution with a link back is all we ask, and it is a request rather than a condition.

The tables and computed statistics may be reproduced with a link to the page they came from. What we ask you not to do is take the venue database wholesale to rebuild the directory somewhere else, or present our computed figures as your own measurements. The difference between citation and appropriation has never been hard to see.

If you are writing about a market we cover and need a figure we have not published, ask. We can usually run the query.

Getting a listing corrected or removed

If a venue on this site has closed, moved, changed hands or is listed with the wrong details, write to us with the page URL and what is wrong. Corrections to name, address, hours and website go in at the next build; a closure removes the venue entirely rather than marking it closed, because a directory full of ghosts is worse than a shorter one.

Venue owners can ask for removal without giving a reason, and we do not require an account, a claim process or a fee to do it. We will also correct anything in the editorial text — the wine guides and region pages — where you can point at the error. Naming what is wrong gets a faster answer than telling us a page is bad.

Reaching the team

One address handles everything: support, corrections, listing removals, press and partnership questions. We read every message and reply personally, usually within one business day. There is no ticket system, no chatbot and no phone line.

VinSip is published by Vast Flow LLP, which also builds the VinSip app for iOS and Android. The site and the app share a company but not a database: nothing you do in the app appears here, and this site does not have an account system, a login or a comment field.

What to put in a message so it gets a useful answer

The messages we can act on fastest name a page and name the problem: the URL, the venue, and what is wrong with it. "The hours on this page are wrong, we changed to 11–7 in June" is actionable in one reply. "Your site is out of date" is not.

For a listing removal, the page URL and a line saying you are the owner is enough — we do not ask for documents, and we do not run a verification process that would let us pretend the request came from anyone else.

What we cannot help with: finding a specific bottle, valuing a collection, authenticating a label, arranging a delivery, or anything requiring a licence to sell alcohol. Those go to a merchant or an auction house, and telling you so quickly is more useful than a slow non-answer.