For The Love Of Port

From day 1 of the 1985 horizontal, 24-25 Jan 2015, Holiday Inn Issaquah. All Ports were tasted blind. Unless otherwise noted, Ports were decanted for ~4 hours the morning of the tasting. The ones that I decanted received ~8 hours of decant overnight and were then stoppered for another ~6 hours until the tasting.

1985 Cockburn Vintage Port

Color: Medium red, showing age. It hasn't started toward tawny yet, but it's definitely trending toward ruby (pink).

Nose: Slightly dusty with some soft fruit hiding.

Palate: Some buttery notes, but not much in the way of fruit. Slightly tart. Somewhat thin and weak, but not as bad as #11 (Barros).

Score: 85 points. 1983 is vastly superior, even with the high incidence of TCA. That chasm makes me think this bottle was probably stored poorly for a while.

You got me thinking about colors. I always thought of ruby as being pretty much standard red, maybe even with a little darkness. I hadn't really thought of it as pink.

And I thought of garnet as just a deeper version. In another note you mentioned garnet having some brown and purple, which I didn't think was the case. So I did some googling. There are lots of images out there.

Ruby really seems depend on the lighting. A ruby can tend to pink on a white background, or with bright lighting. So I understand your thinking. But I'm still sticking with my original concept on that one. Also, a lot of rubies appear to have a little magenta tint to them as well.

I will modify my thinking on garnet. I can see that brown in a lot of the images. Some show a little purple-magenta, but the brown is more common. It also really shows in the raw uncut material.

This page had some good images: http://gemstonemagnetism.com/how_to_pg_4.html

Next up, I will describe a Port as having the color of Rubellite Tourmaline or Pink Spinel.

I'm specifically thinking of the gemstone when I say ruby, and the gemstone is (typically) a pretty light red. To me it has quite a few pink hues to it as well, which distinguishes it from just plain red for me.

I'm also most certainly affected by having grown up in Nebraska. "Red" for me means scarlet due to the Cornhuskers, so my bias is slightly to the orange side of red or basically the opposite of crimson. Because of this bias, I typically use "deep red" when describing Port that's really a true red. I also probably use garnet instead of crimson in some cases due to my bias against the Oklahoma Sooners.