Meet Matt Ellis
The wine merchant behind the bargains. 25 years in the trade, still hasn't found a warehouse he didn't want to rummage through.
25 Years. Thousands Of Bottles. Zero Pretentiousness.
Matt Ellis has spent more than 25 years buying, selling, tasting and — by his own admission — talking rather too much about wine, beer and spirits. He's walked the vineyards of France, poked around breweries across Europe, hosted more tastings than he can reliably count, and spent a genuinely worrying amount of time wandering warehouses looking for bottles nobody else spotted.
He's fluent in wine. He's completely fluent in beer. And he remains firmly of the view that hops are just grapes with a gym membership — a theory nobody has yet managed to disprove.
How He Got Here
Matt started out the way most people in the trade do: convinced that wine was brilliant, and slightly baffled by how much everyone insisted on making it complicated. Back in 2008 he founded The Smiling Grape Company with one stubborn idea — that good drink should be fun, not frightening.
Since then he's paired wine with burgers, kebabs, Friday-night takeaways, films and the occasional questionable karaoke session. Wine experts raised an eyebrow. Customers raised a glass. It turned out people rather liked being spoken to like adults instead of being lectured.
What He Actually Does All Day
- Tastes things (someone has to).
- Hunts down overstocks, discontinued lines and end-of-line bottles the big shops have moved on from.
- Argues that a £6 bottle can absolutely out-punch a £20 one.
- Writes tasting notes that occasionally make sense after the second glass.
Matt's rule: if he wouldn't happily drink it himself on a Tuesday, it doesn't go on the shelf.
One For The Record Books
And yes, before you ask — Matt once achieved a Guinness World Record for pub crawling. Some people collect stamps. Matt collected pubs, in one heroic, record-breaking session. We consider it early, rigorous field research.
That's the whole philosophy, really. A real merchant, tasting real bottles, telling you the honest truth about why they're cheap — then getting out of the way so you can enjoy them.