Oh my: isn’t the current draft of placemats sufficiently complicated?PhilW wrote:You could perhaps sufficiently reduce the 'insider knowledge' of the people performing the initial decant, while also increasing the number of people who could be involved without compromising port identities with minor modification to your steps:
1. Source sufficient dark glass bottles (there might be a few suitable old port bottles around somewhere...?), labelled 1,2,3...
2. Label your decanters A,B,C...
3. As pre previous description, create tags with house/year for each port, and equivalent tags labelled 1,2,3... and A,B,C...
4. Group1 decant from original bottles to dark glass bottles (selecting a random numbered bottle and its tag), in each case taking original tag and over-attaching the numeric tag on the name tag
5. Group2 decant from dark glass bottles to decanters (or other bottles), selecting random letter bottle and decanter with appropriate tags, and attach the alphabetic tag over the top of the numeric one.
- Additional notes:
(i) Group1 and Group2 during preparation can be any size, provided no-one is a member of both groups. In fact, the more people in each group, the less chance for any colour comparison by each person decanting multiple bottles.
(ii) Optionally, make the people doing the decanting wear dark sunglasses, to further reduce the colour perception of the port in the funnel during decanting (this would assume you are double-decanting through muslin/whatever, and relying on experience and the cloth rather than visual back-lit sign of first sediment)
(iii) Instead of tags, use envelopes, one inside the other, so any tells on card edges etc are hidden within each step
Please confirm that you want an extra set of decanter labels, distinct from α63 β63 γ63 δ63, and distinct from T63 G63 F63 D63, to act as an intermediate step. But it would be simpler to have four copies of labels ‟63”, no other markers (an no pre-pour sheets). These ‟63”s etc go over (or in an envelope containing) the T63 G63 F63 D63 series. Further copies of the plain-vintage labels can can go over/in again. Finally the last shuffle would be labelled with the Greeks (α63 β63 γ63 δ63).
OK?