Privacy — Mescita
Last updated 1 October 2026
The principle
Mescita keeps count of your bar and your cellar. It has no account and no server of ours. The one thing it can put where we could see it is a barcode and the product it belongs to, and only when you confirm — never anything about you. We never receive, store or see any of your data. There is nothing for us to sell, lose or hand over, because there is nothing on our side to begin with.
What the app keeps
Mescita records what you put into it:
- your products and bottles: name, brand, category, strength, size, photo, barcode, retailer code, price paid, dates, where it came from and where it is kept
- your wines: producer, vintage, region, drinking window and the rest of the wine card
- your tasting notes and stars
- the people you serve and their tastes: a first name, and the preferences learned from their stars — no age, no sex
- the log of drinks served, your shopping list and your glassware
- a snapshot for the widgets and the Watch — tonight’s cocktail, the shopping list, the wines to drink — in the app’s own folder on your device
Where it lives
On your device. If you turn iCloud on, it also syncs through your own private iCloud database, which Apple encrypts and which we cannot open, read or list. We have no key and no access of any kind. If you share your bar, Apple’s CloudKit sharing makes it visible to the iCloud accounts you invite, and to no one else. Your Apple Watch receives the shopping list from your iPhone directly, through Apple’s WatchConnectivity.
What it asks permission for
Every one of these is optional. Refuse any of them and the rest of the app keeps working.
- Camera
- To scan a barcode, read a label or photograph it. The image stays on your device, and the text on the label is read on the device by Apple’s Vision framework.
- Approximate location, while the app is open — Pro
- To get the local temperature for tonight’s suggestions. It is sent to Apple Weather for that and never kept.
- Health — write only
- Only if you ask for it. See the Health section below.
- Notifications
- Local reminders, scheduled on your device: a bottle to finish before a date, a product to buy again, a wine whose drinking window opens or closes. No push, no server.
Health
Mescita writes one thing to Health, and only if you turn it on: the number of drinks in a recipe you mark as made. It reads nothing from Health.
What leaves the device
The app has no analytics, no crash reporting, no advertising and no third-party kit of any kind. What it does send, it sends only to the services below, and only for what you asked it to do:
- Mescita’s public barcode base
- A public CloudKit database at Apple, in Mescita’s own container. When you scan a code your own bar does not know, the app looks it up there. If you confirm, it adds the code and its product — code, name, brand, category, strength, size — so the next person finds it. Nothing personal goes with it: no photo, no price, no note. This base is the only content we can see; CloudKit stores it under an anonymous identifier that tells us nothing about you.
- Open Food Facts
- An open product database (openfoodfacts.org, under the ODbL licence). It receives the barcode alone, with the app’s name as it asks apps to give, and only for a code that neither your bar nor the public base knows.
- Apple Weather — Pro
- Your approximate location, to get the local temperature for tonight’s suggestions.
- Retailer links
- The search links to the SAQ, the LCBO and the other retailers open in Safari when you tap them. The app itself sends them nothing.
Apart from the barcodes you choose to add to the public base, none of it reaches us. We have no server in any of these paths.
The suggestions
Requests in your own words (Pro) are read by Apple’s language model on your device. Where it is not available, a keyword reading does the same job, on the device too. The model does not choose the recipes: it translates what you ask, and the app picks from your real stock. Nothing is sent to a model on a server — not ours, not anyone’s.
Mescita is at version 1.0, in internal testing (TestFlight). This page describes the app as it is built today, and it changes with it.
Your data is yours
Export your bar and your cellar to a CSV file whenever you want, without asking us. Delete the app and what was only on the device is gone; what synced to iCloud goes when you remove it from your iCloud settings. A barcode you added to the public base stays there for everyone: it carries no personal data. We cannot recover any of your data for you, because we never had it.
Children
The app is not directed at children and collects nothing about anyone, of any age.
Changes to this page
If the app ever starts doing something this page does not describe, this page changes first. The date at the top says when it last did.
Your rights
Quebec’s Law 25 and similar laws elsewhere give you the right to access, correct and delete the personal information a business holds about you. In our case the answer is the same every time: we hold none. Your information is on your device and in your own iCloud, where you can already read, change and delete all of it yourself.
Contact
Nidello — Canada — [email protected]