Master of Wine: A Spanish scandal

"This kind of investigation happens very rarely. We have had maybe 5 complaints like this within the past 56 years", explains Nathanial Anderson, spokesperson of the institute. "We cannot comment on any details of this investigation and we will definitely not make any kind of judgement at this time".

Pancho Campo, who organizes wine tastings worldwide with his Wine Academy of Spain, as well as the latest WineFuture Hong Kong, was in charge of many tastings for Jay Miller, who is the loyal assistant of Robert Parker's Wine Advocate. The latter were probably what brought these accusations to life on a wine blog, where they discussed the rumor that Pancho Campo provided Jay Miller with certain Spanish winery names and that Miller had given these wineries particularly favorable ratings. The blog entries mentioend that there was financial "gifts" involved in order to honor these ratings.

Miller and Campo have heavily disputed these accusations so far and Miller even resigned from his Wine Advocate services right away. Robert Parker, publisher of the Wine Advocate, has mentioned his intent to investigate this complaint himself. He says: "We have had all the emails sent by Jay Miller in 2009 translated and we are working on evaluating their content. In terms of Pancho Campo...well, he naturally turned into the dart board for envious competitors due to his success.  Even his successful conferences about climate change are the reason for the jealousy of many people. We are hoping that we can reslove this issue very soon".

FLASHBACK:

Pancho Campo founded the Wine Academy of Spain in 2003 and was the one who developed the Spanish Wine Education certification program in combination with the Wine & Spirit Education Trust (WSET). The Academy is a flagpole for the research of climate change and it organized the World Conference on Climate Change and Wine in 2006 and 2008.

In 2008, Campo was named the first Spanish Master of Wine. Then, right before the Winefuture Rioja 2009, where international wine personalities like Robert Parker, Jancis Robinson, Oz Clarke, Steven Spurrier, Miguel Torres, Robert Joseph and Gary Vaynerchuk are counted, it first came out that Interpol had intended to take Campo in custody. Shortly afterwards, Campo resigned from his position of President of the Wine Academy of Spain. His reason was that he had to concentrate on equalizing these accusations". Then, in 2010, Interpol withdrew its warrant and which was commented by Campo: "I was informed by Interpol that they had my name erased from this investigation. They found out that a mistake had been made and finally admitted that their accusations against me were unjustified and unfair". (red.yoopress)