Campbell Mattinson, writer, wine reviewer, founder of The Winefront, three editions of the Big Red Wine Book (2008, 2009, 2010) and author of WE WERE NOT MEN. (Melbourne, Victoria, AUS)

Years in the Industry.
I started a journalism cadetship in 1987 but my first wine-related article was in 2000.

My Three Biggest Challenges to Wellness:
The volume of alcohol, in three different ways.

1. The biggest threat is of course the amount of wine that I consume. On any given day there will be hundreds if not thousands of wine (sample) bottles at home. Keeping the amount of it that I drink in check is not just a constant battle but, glacier-like, a creeping one. The price I pay for free wine samples is eternal vigilance. I often pick up a glass of wine, and drink it, and as I do I think to myself: I don’t want to be doing this. Abstinence is much easier than moderation but abstinence in the normal run of the wine reviewing world is effectively impossible.

2. Then, there’s the amount that I don’t drink, but merely ‘taste’. Tasting is much better (for you) than drinking but when done in heavy volume, day after day, it takes a physical toll than is heavier than is generally acknowledged. If I do a three months burst of intense tasting for a book, for instance, I am completely physically wrung out by the end of it.

3. And then there’s the presence of the physical bottles themselves. When free wine samples started arriving unbidden on the doorstep, 20 years ago, it felt like the best thing ever. When your whole house is overrun though with these free unsolicited bottles, 20 years later, it can have the most profoundly debilitating effect. Everywhere I look, all the time, I see bottles, and these bottles represent work, and this work represents the hopes and dreams of real-life wine people. Sometimes it feels as though all these bottles are staring at me, hoping that they’ll be picked next. If you can’t beat them, leave them. The day I took my writing self to a remote office, and left the wine at home, was the day I started to feel better.

How I Keep it Together:
Sometimes I keep it together. Sometimes I don’t. Physical and mental wellbeing has a tide to it; it goes out and it comes back, or it does for me. I set myself weekly exercise goals, based on time: every week I make sure that I spend XX hours getting a good amount of air into the lungs.

Some days I walk, some days I cycle. Cycling is particularly good because you get drawn into its community. Cycling is an exercise in Aerodynamic Management, which is why cyclists hang around in groups. The better the group you’re in, the better you’ll ride. It’s not a bad lesson.

But these days I mainly keep it together via photography. Indeed I’ve been known to say that photography saved my life. I took it up maybe four years ago, in terms of using a proper camera etc, and like all these things it works because when I’m looking through the viewfinder there’s nothing else in the world other than the frame of the shot and the moment itself. It makes you concentrate on the now like there’s no tomorrow. And it makes you appreciate/worship the most basic of things: light. Remarkably, I started writing a novel in 1990 and didn’t finish it until 2020. It had me stuck, in more ways than one. But then I started playing with cameras, and watching the light, and focussing on the moment, and before long that novel I’d been contorting myself over for all those years suddenly picked its ears up and start wagging it tail at me, as if I’d found my way home to the heart of it just by looking outside and zeroing in on the light.

What Inspires Me:
Anyone who keeps going when it would be fair and reasonable to give up. And anyone who dreams high when it would be fair and reasonable to dream low.

A Quote I Love:
It’s not an inspiring quote, and yet it is. ‘Everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even.’ Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky.

You can connect with Campbell on Instagram @campbellmattinson, Facebook, and Campbell Mattinson.com