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Campbell Mattinson – the founder of Australia’s most active wine review site, The Winefront, the former chief editor of both the Halliday Wine Companion book and Halliday Magazine, and the creative director at Mattinson Media & Photography – is the publisher of this Mattinson site.

His Mattinson site covers wine, travel, spirits and photography, though the focus will always predominantly be on wine. The Mattinson site’s audience grew 3194% year-on-year from June 2024 to June 2025 – and has kept growing since. Mattinson has run and/or edited subscription-based sites and wine magazines and books for the past 25 years. Mattinson has been a journalist for 40 years. Campbell Mattinson is a trusted and influential voice whose credibility has been built over four decades of independent journalism.

Campbell Mattinson tastes between 5000 and 10,000 wines each year. He pours the wines in the morning, tastes, and re-tastes in the afternoon. When tasting the range of a single producer, he tastes unmasked. When tasting in situ at a winery or at a wine event, he tastes unmasked (as all wine media do). When tasting in comparative flights – by region or varietal – he always tastes blind.

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More About Me

I’m a journalist, novelist, photographer and wine critic. I’ve been a journalist for 40 years; worked for The Winefront for 24 years; been married for 27 years; live 650 metres from where I was born; and now use my childhood home as an office. When I’m on to something that I love, I hold on tight. I’m the author of six books; I’m a past chief editor at Halliday Wine Companion; past editor of the Halliday Wine Companion Magazine; past editor of Australian Sommelier Magazine; and past editor of the Telegraph group of (local) newspapers.

I was named by The Independent as the Australian Young Writer of the Year in 1995. In 1996, I won the Best Australian Sports Writing Award. I’m the author of the multi-award-winning book The Wine Hunter, and of the best-selling novel We Were Not Men (Fourth Estate, 2021). In 2008, 2009 and 2010 I published editions of The Big Red Wine Book. I’ve somehow managed to win the Australian Wine Communicator of the Year Award twice, and been named Runner-Up another year.

In 2020, I won – as the writer/director – the Best Regional Short Film Award at the St Kilda Film Festival. In 2026 three of my photographs were short-listed for the World Food Photography Awards.

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I’m a storyteller. I see people and I listen to them and they get inside me and I tell them. I taste wines and I feel them and they get inside me and I tell them too. I get hired as a writer, photographer, videographer, documentary filmmaker, and wine critic.

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/ Books

/ Awards

  • 1995  Independent Monthly Young Writer of the Year Award

  • 1996 Best Australian Sports Writing Award

  • 2004 Wine Press Club Wine Communicator Award

  • 2005 R/U Wine Press Club Wine Communicator Award

  • 2006 Wine Press Club Wine Communicator Award

  • 2013 Wine Press Club Best Feature Article

  • 2016 Louis Roederer International Wine Writers’ Awards Chairman’s Award

/ About me

When I was ten years old a primary school teacher accused me of plagiarising a paragraph from a book. I hadn’t.

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I grew up in Newport in the shadow and flare of an oil refinery. I did work experience in the refinery’s kitchen. I peeled potatoes, thousands of them, and piped custard into eclairs, chocolate ones. The front window of our lounge room faced this refinery. The orange flames danced on the wall beside the tv.

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I grew up next-door to a beekeeper. His hair was as crazy as his garden. He’d hang chunks of pumpkin for us on the side fence. He fed me honeycomb straight from the hive one day. He was married to a woman who was short, generous, timid and kind, the latter in enormous and inspiring measure.

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I washed dishes at the Kohinoor Indian Restaurant in Williamstown for 10 years. I spent 12 months doing data entry at a stockbroker in Birmingham. I worked for nine months as a proofreader of phone books.

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In 1996 I made up a story and called it THIS IS NOT A LOVESONG. The action in this story takes place on creeks and rivers. It won the Best Australian Sports Writing Award. The Australian newspaper called me up to arrange a photoshoot with the key characters, as if the story was real.

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A work colleague read this short story and said, ‘Bastard knows how to move people.’

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I grew up in Newport but I loved a country block in Flowerdale. It belonged to my grandma Elma and grandpa Jack. It had a creek at the back. I hardly spoke a word to Elma but I knew that she was the kindest person I’d ever meet. Just before she died I saw her in hospital. She apologised because the length of the hospital gown meant that I could see a part of her bare leg.

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At some point I realised that ambition is more about the past than the future. 

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I haven’t walked into a job as an employee since 2003. I turn the soil myself, word by word, over and over.

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One day my grandpa Jack and grandma Elma sold the Flowerdale farm and moved to a village. I’ve spent the past 35 years driving to the small hidden driveway of that sold-off property at Flowerdale. I look out at the land, all wet and cluttered with gums. My family’s in there, I think, even though they’re not.

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Every year 7000-8000 bottles of wine arrive on my doorstep, most of them unbidden, or roughly 40 full bottles of wine every workday.

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Wine is a portrait of its people in their landscape, their hopes and their seasons. Most days for the past 20 years I’ve sat at my work desk and made assessments of these hopes, these seasons. I never have been, and never will be, comfortable in this daily judgement of others.

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One day in 2003 my partner and I went on holiday to a place called Porepunkah. It’s a tiny town in the mountains and the trees. While on holiday we viewed a house for sale. It had a creek at the back just like the one at Flowerdale. We bought it, while still on holiday. Ever since then I’ve wondered when we’ll go home.

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One night in 1997 I was sitting at a dull corporate function when a red wine was poured. It was a briary cabernet from the Yarra Valley. I lifted it and my life changed. The wine smelled like Flowerdale. I felt like it was whistling at me, just like grandpa Jack might. I could see Elma’s face in it. This wine was made by a bloke named James Halliday. James was born in 1938. I met him about seven years later. I went to work for him.

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Every now and then despair, mixed in with anxiety, gets the better of me, and I give up. And then I get going again, as if despair and anxiety are refineries, or shadows, or flames, or energy.