ThePortForum.com

I have created a new feature on my personal website which may be of interest, and I hope could grow to be a useful resource; It is a gallery of vintage port bottles, labels, capsules and bottle details.

VP Identification Gallery

Initially the web page allows some simple filtering (by house, year range) and will display all images for the specified filters, e.g. all images for bottles from 1970-1977 inclusive or all capsule images from that same date range. The image database only contains a small number of images to begin with but my intention is to grow this over time with the intention of containing as many variants of house/year/bottler as possible. This does mean that I will likely be armed with a camera more often at future tastings, and also leads to a potential request - to save the capsule as well as the cork to bring to the tasting, if it is intact.

At its current size, it will likely be of minimal interest/use, though can help answer some limited questions (such as "When did Fonseca stop using the word 'Finest' from their Vintage Port") and assist identification of some symbols. If I am able to add to the database of images sufficiently over time, I hope it this can grow into a useful resource.

At this early stage of initial implementation I would welcome any comments or observations, either privately or on the forum, in particular on usability or behavioural issues.

i'd recommend an open source jscript chunk such as

http://jquerytools.org/demos/scrollable/gallery.html

to help you better arrange the images

You can find a raft of labels for some VPs, most notably G70; which starts with the old Graham family label, followed by about four designs from the Symingtons, depending on when the bottles were released.

However, they are now seeing the attraction of using the Graham family design again, when releasing very old stocks; so an old Graham with a a Graham family label has not necessarily been long cellared in the UK, although at the moment, the relative freshness of the label would be a giveaway..

A significant number of further images have now been added to the database, which has also helped me sort out policies for naming, importing, cropping and cataloguing. If anyone does spot any errors, please let me know; thanks.