Clear garnet and clear edges with decent sediment and obvious tartarates.  Smoldering latex and dirty baby diapers in the nose along with a round, full glycerin-ey rotting vegetable?ish sorta lettuce left in the crisper-drawer of your refrigerator for too long.  Crisp acidity redeems things a bit and full, round cherry-preserve fattens things up.  Oh dear how Zinfandel has left us.  I have completely stopped drinking them since moving to the zinfandel-cultural-wasteland of the Central Coast.  I picked this one up on a whim–it’s not Dry Creek Valley, but it is RRV–to see what I could find.  A fairly miserable wine not really meriting even this much ink.  Not dreadful, just the bouquet falls so short of the actual taste.  Drying tannins finish things up and really leave you asking, “Why?”  Beautiful bottle, but dreadful wine.  14-2   ◊