(NationalPost) - The Liquor Control Board of Ontario is destroying the personal information of wine, beer and spirit club members that the privacy commissioner said it was wrong to collect — but only after putting up a legal fight that cost more than a quarter of a million dollars.

Now the LCBO is in the process of winding down its wine club program, which allowed enthusiasts belonging to those clubs to buy products that aren’t normally available at the LCBO and to get volume discounts.

The Vin de Garde wine club complained to Ontario’s Information and Privacy Commissioner in 2012 that the LCBO had started requiring more information beyond members’ names and addresses, now including the precise details and quantities of their orders.

The wine club members worried that the LCBO was collecting and tracking their consumption habits, noting that people buy alcohol anonymously in LCBO retail outlets every day.

Consumption was not being tracked, the LCBO said, but it needed the information to process the orders, to be able to recall products and to detect fraud. The LCBO was concerned the wine clubs could stockpile alcohol and illegally resell it.

The LCBO gave evidence of 12 companies that were charged with such violations, but none of those examples was a wine club, the privacy commissioner said.

“The LCBO has not provided my office with much more than anecdotal or hypothetical evidence to support its position that the illegal resale of liquor by wine clubs in this province is so problematic that it necessitates the collection of the personal information of club members,” wrote then-privacy commissioner Ann Cavoukian.

Further, the LCBO had managed to process the club’s orders since 2004 before requiring the personal information, Cavoukian noted.

She ruled that the information collection violated the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, ordering the LCBO to stop collecting it and to destroy what it already had.

The LCBO spent at least $269,845 fighting the order over three years, according to figures disclosed to The Canadian Press through a Freedom of Information request.