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 Gould Campbell Vintage Port
This is one of the bottles that I decanted on Friday night.

Color: Medium light red.

Nose: Difficult to smell - there's not much here.

Palate: Soft, mature. Smoothly fruity but fairly simple. Just enough acidity to keep it interesting. A great daily drinker.

Score: 87 points. When revealed I was very surprised, as my experience with the 1985 Gould Campbell has typically been much better than this. (Including its brother purchased at the same time, as well as a bottle purchased recently from WTSO.) I suspect there was something wrong with this bottle, but nothing obvious presented so I marked it down as bottle variation.

Glenn:

I had a similar experience with the first 2 bottles of "85 GC which I purchased from WTSO. I hope it does not hold true for the remaining bottles I purchased.

R Bull wrote:I had a similar experience with the first 2 bottles of "85 GC which I purchased from WTSO. I hope it does not hold true for the remaining bottles I purchased.

My WTSO bottle was significantly better than this one from the 1985 Horizontal - it was of similar quality to the "brother" bottle I linked above. So in my case I hope that the WTSO bottles DO hold true for the remaining bottles!

(I thought I'd posted a note about the WTSO bottle, but I don't see it in the TNDB so I must have forgotten.)