Visitor age

As owners and operators of the diffordsguide.com domain we strive to manage our website in a responsible manner, particularly with regard to its content, how this is presented, and the visitors we target this content towards – specifically discerning drinkers above the legal drinking age.

Our content is intended for visitors who are over the legal drinking age (as stated in our Terms of Use) and our writing style, accompanying photography and videos reflect this. Much of our content is educational and longform, particularly with regard to production processes and historical facts.

We only promote our website in environments, on media or at events where the audience is over legal drinking age, or predominantly over legal drinking age. E.g. show/exhibitions and tastings specifically targeted at adults with appropriate checks.

Visitors to the site may subscribe to receive regular emails highlighting new and relevant content - trade and consumer specific. We require both categories of visitor to provide their date of birth prior to approval by our systems which check their stated date of birth against the legal drinking age in their country (IP geolocation/input). We default to over 21 with some countries (e.g. UK) overridden to accept 18 years old according to the specific legal drinking age in that country.

We ask visitors to "Please enter your date of birth to confirm you are over the legal drinking age" and then require that date of birth to be inputted in a DD.MMM.YYYY format.

Visitors who input a date of birth that indicates they are below the legal drinking age in their country are redirected to drinkaware.co.uk

We conform to the 5th Edition of the Portman Group Code of Practice, particularly with regards to the recommendation "that alcohol is promoted only in media where at least 75% of the audience is aged over 18." As recommended in the code, diffordsguide.com "unquestionably is targeting an adult audience and runs no risk of attracting a significant proportion of under-18 visitors." Indeed, diffordsguide does not attract a significant proportion of visitors under legal drinking age resulting in only a very small proportion of visitors being below 21 years old in countries such as USA.

We are not required to operate age verification to access our website and have chosen not to implement this due to our audience being predominantly discerning drinkers aged above the legal drinking age as specified above. We do not want to unnecessarily impede our audience of discerning drinkers - we do not have content of interest or relevance to other internet users.