Corked: Marc Fennell explores wine cheating scandal in Audible podcast

How do you order wine at a restaurant?

Do you think about the food you’re about to eat? The varietal of grape? The vineyard and the soil? The vintage? Do you consider the year of that hectic frost in that part of the world?

Or do you just order the second cheapest bottle on the menu, making the choice between red or white?

The average person can’t tell you if that particular chianti has notes of hazelnut or raspberry, only that it goes well with fava beans (and liver).

The upper echelons of the wine world can seem opaque, elitist and out-of-reach, and for some in those lofty places, that’s how they want it. How else can you create perceived and real value unless you make it exclusive?

Chances are you haven’t heard of the Court of Master Sommeliers Americas, a professional education and accreditation body that was engulfed in a cheating scandal in 2018.

With accusations of lies, betrayal, conspiracy and institutional failure, it was mostly contained to the wine world but don’t let the esoterica put you off, because what it reveals about those involved is universal to everyone.

Marc Fennell explores the events in his new podcast series, Corked, which is streaming on Audible from today. Like most people, Fennell is not an expert in viticulture, but he does thrive on people’s obsessions, and the people caught up in the 2018 scandal are nothing if not completely consumed by wine.

“From an outside standpoint, it’s relatively low stakes, until you look at what these people have given up to get it – it is literally years of their life,” Fennell told The Nightly. “It is an expensive obsession, it’s like thousands of dollars you spend not just on wine but on travel.

“You realise how much of people’s lives they’ve dedicated to it, suddenly it’s, ‘No, this is a huge deal in these people’s worlds’.”

Since 1969, the Court of Master Sommeliers has conferred the title of master sommelier on the very few who have passed a series of three tests. The honour is so rare, as Fennell pointed out in Corked, there are more astronauts than there are master sommeliers.

The exams consist of three parts but the most difficult is the blind taste test in which candidates have to accurately identify six wines. In 2018, on the morning of the taste test, an email landed in the inboxes of a few of the 120 people scheduled to take the exam.

The subject line was “Heads up” and the body contained just two sets of letters – “PG” and “CnP” – meaning “pinot grigio/gris” and “Chateauneuf-du-Pape”. Someone was giving select candidates an advantage.

The scandal didn’t immediately blow open, but months later when it did, the Court opted to investigate internally, a process that was never made transparent, and made the shocking decision to suspend the master sommelier accreditation of all 24 people who had passed that year.

There was no appealing the decision, no recourse. The fallout on the individuals was immense, and even now, years later, still hanging over their lives.

They include Elton Nichols, one of the candidates who received the illicit email, Dan Pilkey, who is still locked in litigation against the Court, and Jane Lopes, a sommelier who was at the time working at one of Australia’s most famed restaurants, Attica, who all share their side of the story on Corked.

“Whether you’re interested in wine or not, everybody is across the concept of cheating,” Fennell said. “That’s really what it comes down to. It’s like, if you are so desperate for something and you’re so obsessive about something and then one day, you are given the answers, what would you do?”

It might be easy to judge someone else’s mistakes, or find another’s single-focus on something we might view as elitist as silly. But Corked reveals the human side to a story that might seem otherwise abstract or obscure. There’s a cost to obsession.

Fennell is still no expert on wines. His palette, he confessed, was built for cooking and not the elixir of the gods. But through working on Corked, it has given him a different appreciation.

“I’ve gained an enormous respect for people that work in hospitality,” he said. “It’s not that I didn’t respect them before, but when somebody comes up to you in a restaurant, whether they’re a server or a chef or a sommelier, just respecting what they did to get there.

“Most of these people aren’t master sommeliers, they’re just people that love and care and are interested in food and the textures and the histories and the cultures behind it. I’ve grown to really bask in the person more than the product.”

Corked is streaming on Audible.