OK, so THIS is too much.  Really.  Gone overboard here.  Black dark ruby with clear edges.  Heady nose of burning trash and tires with a whallop of AL.  I was actually kinda looking forward to this one–based on the LAST Shale Canyon which was 100% syrah from Chalone AVA.  This one is ‘Central Coast’, 75/25 Arroyo Seco Syrah and Paicines Cab, and at first, I was all “why not Monterey County? and then you realize Paicines is in San Benito County and Arroyo Seco is in Monterey County.  So… Hence the ‘Central Coast’ appellation.  Again, I was really looking forward to this one after the last Shale Canyon, but oh man this one misses.  Just WAAAAAAAY too much.  Completely overdone, burnt, alcoholic, over-extracted, you name it–this wine is guilty of it.  Huge glycerin-ey bouquet makes you cough and entrance is both shockingly acidic and alcoholic and just CONCENTRATED Syrah so concentrated you just want to never drink Syrah again.  This is a bad thing, people.  When you make a wine which so caricatures every nuance of a varietal quality that you never want to see this variety again, you have FAILED.  This shit FAILS.  Huge disgusting over-ripe fruit and mind-numbing tannins and blistering acids so take the whole experience beyond ‘bitter’ it is indescribable.  Seriously, not just merely classic Syrah ‘burnt rubber’–more like trash piles smoldering in Mexico–plastic and metal and tires and dogs and leaves and paper and car batteries–everything they burn in Mexico alongside the road and in the creek-beds.  And I matched this bottle with a hearty wild boar and lentil stew–hoping to really accentuate the ‘roughness’.  But it was not to be.  Really, they have over-extracted this wine into oblivion and the moldy-Vitamin-C finish wraps things up with classic over-extracted aplomb.  I have tasted worse wines.  This one fails in the most plausible of ways–but still fails in terms of balance.  It is just all wrong.  I know a couple-dozen people who would think this wine wonderful.  Bigger is better, ya know… and the only thing I can say good about this bottle is it is not sappy-fruit-forward, something fairly classic in this kind of over-extraction.  But I would almost hazard a guess tasted young, this would be guilty of that also.  15-7 OMG and  ◊