How The Cellar Report is made

Every week a program collects the news published in the past seven days by the outlets listed below, in their own languages. It reads only what each site makes freely available: it respects each site's robots.txt, identifies itself as CellarReportBot, and never gets around a paywall.

An AI model (Claude, by Anthropic) picks the week's stories and writes each one in its own words, crediting and linking the outlet. Quotes are copied word for word, or marked as translated. Critics' tasting notes are never reproduced.

Before an issue goes out, every item is checked twice. First by code: each link must be one of the week's collected articles, each quote must appear in its source, and every number and price must match the source. Then by a second AI pass that compares each item with the full article it cites. Items that can't be confirmed are left out. The Assemblage team approves each issue before it is sent.

Figures about Assemblage itself (for example, which regions people logged most this week) are anonymous totals of at least five people. No individual tasting notes or ratings are ever shown or sent to the AI.

Mistakes can still slip through. If you spot one, reply to the email and we'll correct the archive.

When you sign up, we store your email address, when you signed up and confirmed, where on the site you signed up, and which version of the sign-up text you agreed to. You confirm with a link we email you (double opt-in); if you don't, nothing is sent. Signed in to Assemblage with an email? Then you can subscribe with one click in your account, since that address is already confirmed.

The newsletter is sent through Resend, our email provider. We count whether an issue was delivered and opened and which links were clicked, to learn what readers find useful. We never sell or share your address. To stop the sign-up form being abused, it uses Cloudflare Turnstile, and we keep a scrambled (hashed) form of your IP address for one day, never the address itself.

The newsletter may include anonymous totals from Assemblage, such as how many people logged a region this week, always covering at least five people. Your own notes and ratings never appear in it.

Every email has an unsubscribe link that works with one click, and you can switch it off in your account. The Cellar Report is for readers aged 18 and over.

Our crawler is CellarReportBot/1.0. It fetches one page at a time from your site with a pause between requests, once a week, and follows your robots.txt. To be left out, disallow CellarReportBot there, or write to us.