2025: The Port Forum Christmas Tasting - The Unknown Shipper & His Peculiar Friends, 11 December 2025 at the White Horse

[Alex Bridgeman]

On Thursday 11th December a few of us gathered together at the White Horse in Newport, Essex to open some bottles with no labels and few clues as to their identity. There were also some oddities opened alongside them. Many bottles cold be identified from their branded corks, but a large minority had no branding or illegible branding.

Organisation Thread

Review Thread

The Wines:
1904 Burne Turner
1935 Croft
1920 Gould Campbell
1917 Graham
1963 Kopke Colheita
1937 Quinta do Noval Colheita
1974 Port Society Colheita
1852 Sandeman London Particular
1947 Tuke Holdsworth
???? Unknown Shipper
???? Unknown Shipper
1900 Unknown Shipper
1920s Unknown Shipper
1963 Warre
1977 Warre

[Alex Bridgeman]

Does anyone have a picture of the scoring sheet from the Xmas tasting?

If I was the scorer, I appear to have no recollection, no photo and no piece of paper in my pile of treasured pieces of paper.

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[Alex Bridgeman]

Thanks Mike!

To cross-reference the scores with the wines, the wines in order of being tasted were:

1. Gould Campbell 1920
2. Unknown — old bottle, unbranded cork, estimated to be late 1800s (from Phil)
3. Croft 19?? — last two digits of the cork difficult to read, but probably 1935
4. A J da Silva 1937 Colheita, bottled in 1972
5. Sandeman 1852, shipped from Portugal in 1863 and bottled in London by Richard Coverly in 1886
6. Graham 1917
7. Warre 1963
8. Unknown 1900, bottled 1902 by Sandiford, Son & Armstrong (from Tom)
9. Unknown — old bottle, unbranded cork, probably late 1800s (from Charles)
10. Kopke 1963 Colheita, bottled 1984
11. Burne Turner 1904
12. Tuke Holdsworth 1947
13. Polish mead, made in the 1960s — one of the better drinks of the evening
14. Ortega Beerenauslese 1992 from an unknown producer
15. Warre 1977
16. Unknown — no branding visible on the cork but from the style of the bottle believed to be from the 1920s
17. The Port Society’s 1974 Colheita from Quevedo, bottled 2013