Controversial Block couple Sharon and Ankur have taken to Instagram to explain last night’s sneaky move during a lucrative challenge.

You can bet the producers of The Block are rubbing their hands together with glee: After the cheating scandal that dominated the last season of the show (to great ratings success), Tuesday’s episode suggested there could be some unfair gameplay going on again this year.

According to the couple at the centre of the claims, however, they were just using a clever tactic the others hadn’t thought of — pulling out their phones during a challenge to Google the answers.

Married couple Sharon and Ankur are already this season’s most controversial contestants, clashing with their fellow players and even their own builder, in a fiery text exchange aired on Monday’s episode.

In scenes aired the following night, all five teams headed off-site to Levantine Hill winery to take part in a potentially lucrative challenge.

The teams were tasked with trying to replicate the taste of a premium wine blend – a 2015 Samantha’s Paddock Mélange Traditionnel, to be exact – by tasting and mixing several wines together to make their own bottle.

The closest attempt – as judged by a chief wine maker – would win $50,000 of wine to take back to The Block and increase the value of their home.

As the rest of the teams muddled through various blends and taste tests, Sharon and Ankur appeared to have a different tactic.

The couple were shown glancing around nervously as they looked at their phones, before Ankur put his phone down and announced: “Cool. I know what it is, I know the percentages … We’ve got Cab Sav, Merlot, Malbec, Cabernet, Petit Verdot.”

As The Block showed viewers, those ingredients – in order, with exact percentages listed for each – are displayed in the online tasting notes for the wine, which is the top Google result for “Levantine Hill 2015 Samantha’s Paddock”:

Defending the move today, the couple declared they hadn’t broken any rules during the challenge.

“There are absolutely no rules that we cannot use our phones or search the net/google anything,” they wrote.

“This part of the challenge required us to create a 2022 blend of the wine, which doesn’t exist. We took a chance and thought it couldn’t be too far off the 2015 blend, notes which were readily available. THAT was our strategy, and it worked.”

The couple completed the task in under 10 minutes, leaving the other contestants in their dust as they progressed to the second part of the challenge – designing a label for their wine bottle with a graphic designer, for another $50k in wine winnings.

And Sharon and Ankur’s behaviour there had the other Blockheads seeing red, as they spent more than an hour with the designer working on their label, while the other couples banked up behind them and the clock ran out. The teams behind them all had less than 10 minutes to design and create their labels from scratch.

Later on, Sharon and Ankur were announced as the winners of the wine-blending portion of the challenge, picking up the prize worth $50k as the chief wine maker marvelled at how well they’d done.

As the couples choppered away from the winery, Ankur was seen winking at Sharon, who whispered to him: “Yeah, it’s all you, honey.”

Their fellow contestants certainly had some questions, asking how they had concocted a near-perfect replica of a complex blended wine in less than 10 minutes.

As Ankur explained, he’d drunk that exact wine, which retails at $250 a bottle, “every day during Covid.”

Sharon’s explanation slightly confused matters.

“They sponsored Fashion Week last year, or the year before,” the model and actress said.

“I went to 10 different fashion shows, and every time, they gave me bottles of this wine.”

Their fellow competitors were less than convinced by the couple’s Covid / Fashion Week explanation for knowing the exact blend of this premium wine.

“If you’re going to do something like Google and you don’t want people to know, STOP TALKING,” Rachel said in a to-camera interview. “Stop making up stories about it!”

And because this is The Block, you can bet this isn’t the last we’ll hear about this potential cheating controversy: a preview of Wednesday’s episode shows hosts Scott Cam and Shelley Craft going house-to-house, whipping up some outrage over the challenge result among the other contestants.

A Sydney man accused of stalking one of Australia’s top models has pleaded not guilty.

Block couple Sharon and Ankur have found themselves in Scotty Cam’s bad books after dodging the truth about their $50k challenge win this week.

Block contestants Sharon and Ankur have aired a fiery late-night text from their own builder, fuming at how he’s been treated by them.