Who we are · Marcel, Dijon and Matt, Newcastle

Matt and Marcel on stone steps with a bottle, a glass of red and a baguette

The two of us · France · September 2026

The origins.

A simple observation

The English love French wine. You only have to look. But we tend to buy the same bottles over and over: the big names, the ones on every shelf, the ones you recognise without really looking. Fair enough. We all go back to what we know, like the same café every morning.

Those wines are well made. That's not the point. The point is the other wine: the one at the end of a lane the sat nav refuses to believe in. Hardly anyone this side of the Channel has heard of it. Not yet.

Behind it there's usually a father and his son, working less than ten hectares from first light to last. It doesn't show on the label. It shows in the glass. The same way you can tell, without knowing how, that a meal was made by someone who cares about you.

“A wine made by a grower and his son: you can taste it in the glass.”

Marcel

That's where Tiños Viños came from. Nothing clever. Marcel knows which doors to knock on. I know the people at home who'd want what's behind them. So we go, we knock, we talk, and we come back with the wine. Soon we'll bring it to you.

“The other wine was never really hidden. It was just waiting for someone to come and knock.”

It started a long way from any vineyard, mostly by accident, the way the good things do. A Frenchman who lives among the vines, an Englishman who wanders and builds things, and a conversation about wine that never really stopped. That's all Tiños Viños is: two friends who are still talking.

Our story.

“You don't really choose your friends. You lose them, and then you go to a lot of trouble to find them again.”

Aswan

I met Marcel on a little boat crossing the Nile at Aswan, on the way to Elephantine Island, with no idea it would stick. He had bike panniers packed to bursting, like he was carrying his whole life on two wheels. He was riding from France to Réunion Island, with the whole of Europe already behind him. I was drifting round Africa with no real plan, just wanting to stay somewhere long enough to see how people actually live.

Before we split up, he asked me the way to his hotel. I pointed. Wrong way, obviously. He walked right round the island in the heat, knackered. I wandered ten minutes the other way and, without realising, walked straight into the same hotel. His. By the time he turned up, after dark, I was half asleep in the lobby as if nothing had happened. He's never quite forgiven me. I still think it's hilarious.

Sudan

We got on straight away. Aswan together, then the queue at the Sudanese consulate, trying to talk our way into visas we weren't sure we deserved. Then Sudan, each our own way: him across the desert on the bike, living on a handful of nuts and a bit of water; me on local buses, squashed in with everyone and their chickens. Every few days we'd find each other again in some town nobody's heard of, Dongola, Karima, Atbara, and he'd appear out of the sand like he'd been part of it.

Khartoum

Then in Khartoum we lost each other. Properly lost. My phone got nicked and I had no way of telling him where I was. The next day I flew to Addis Ababa, and we both figured that was that. The desert had taken back what it lent us.

Newcastle

Marcel didn't give up. He rang the airline to ask if a Matt had been on the flight. Confidential, of course, and he didn't even know my surname. The only number he had was an Egyptian one, and that had gone with my phone. All he had left was one detail: my mum was an interior designer in Newcastle, and she had a website.

Months later he told the story to another Frenchman on the road, who just said: try anyway. So he found her site, wrote to a woman he'd never met, and asked if she was Matt's mum. She said yes. She said I'd mentioned him. And she passed on my details without telling me, which, looking back, is exactly what my mum would do.

Zanzibar

We met again on a beach in Zanzibar. The first bottles after a long, dry stretch, fish straight off the boats, and nowhere we needed to be. Like time was finally paying us back.

Nîmes, then Burgundy

After that we drifted, the normal way: a message every few months, picking up exactly where we left off. In 2025 I went to Nîmes for the feria and we didn't mention wine once. In 2026 I went back, and this time the idea just came out, almost by accident. I carried on with him up to Burgundy, and that's where we sat down and made it real.