A Cheating Scandal Rocked the Wine World. Marc Fennell’s New Podcast Takes You Inside

Anyone with a passion for wine can potentially become a sommelier, which is less a qualification and more a job description. Becoming a master sommelier though? It’s one of the most difficult qualifications in the world, requiring thousands of dollars, thousands of hours’ study and being born with thousands more tastebuds than the average person.

The notorious three-part exam begins with an oral theory test, where hopefuls answer obscure questions about regions, varietals, regulations, farming, chemistry, production, history, weather and all other aspects of wine-making. The next portion involves blind-tasting six wines and identifying not only each country of origin, but the grape variety, the region it was grown in, the year it was harvested (vintage) and other factors. Finally, there’s a service test, including opening, decanting and pouring wine. It’s estimated just eight per cent of people pass.

“There are less than 300 of them in the world. There are more astronauts than there are master sommeliers,” says podcaster Marc Fennell. He’s just unveiled Corked , a six-part series delving into the surprisingly dark world of the Court of Master Sommeliers (CMS), the 48-year-old organisation that administers the exam and decides who makes the cut.

“I’ve done quite a lot of stories about food over the years. I did the very first Audible original, which was about the race to breed the world’s hottest chilli. And did a series about $10 million worth of stolen nuts,” Fennell says. “I think food and drink are the best prism to understand people. What you choose to eat and drink says something about your culture, your economics, how you feel about your body.”

Corked deals specifically with the 2018 scandal within the CMS’s American chapter. “The morning of [the blind taste test], a handful of people woke up to an email with a series of letters that to most people wouldn’t have meant anything but to those people, they knew exactly what it was,” Fennell says. “It was the answers to some of the wines.”

The uproar led to the board suspending the credentials of 23 of the 24 people who’d recently passed the test, including former Attica sommelier Jane Lopes. From there, Fennell says, the domino effect set off lawsuits, a hospitalisation, job losses and worse. On Corked , his team speaks with those who received the fateful email, and even uncovers who sent it.

“And as you start pushing further, there’s something much darker sitting at the heart of this organisation that rules over these people. It did change how I see wine, and I think that was the thing that surprised me.”

Corked is available now on Audible.