Sometimes the right wine finds you

Finding an intriguing wine often is a matter of luck. Sometimes I've followed friends' advice and been disappointed and sometimes I've bought a bottle on a whim and struck gold. That leads me to a couple wines I've had this oh-so-short New Year that surprised me, perhaps because I wasn't expecting much (admittedly had the bar pretty low) or maybe I wasn't quite ready for the impact these wines were going to make. Neither is very old in terms of vintage or aging, nothing at all like the old cobwebby bottle I stumbled on last spring while perusing the walls of Alessandro Locatelli's Rocche Costamagna winery in La Morra, Italy. That bottle bore a faded, paper label hand-scribed as 1891, and judging from its condition, several nearby bottles and the stories Alessandro shared over more-recent vintages of his mouth-filling Barolo, there's no reason to believe otherwise. The first of this year's wines is Kelley Creek Winery's 2005 Flow Dry Creek Valley. A Bordeaux-type blend of 7 percent cabernet franc, 26 percent cabernet sauvignon and 67 percent merlot, this is a luscious wine that took me a while to really enjoy. Perhaps it only needed to breathe a bit, judging by the way the wine seemed to improve the longer the bottle sat open. I didn't decant it, even though all the hints were telling us that decanting would have helped, but out of the four bottles I had, there's only one remaining, so evidently not decanting wasn't such a bad move. Lots of cherry, plum and black fruit with roundish tannins, the wine retails for around $25-$28. That's a bit pricey in these days of "Honey, I've Shrunk the Budget" but it's worth the special-occasion splurge. Only 1,000 cases made, according to the Kelley Creek Web site. The other "well, shut my mouth" (as Aunt Gladys might have said) wine was the Bellingham Dragon's Lair 2005. This South African wine started out massive and almost too much but soon softened to merely intense. But a good intense, with a pretty decent 14.5-percent alcohol. The blend is interesting: 88 percent shiraz, 10 percent mourvedre and 2 percent viognier. A friend once scoffed at winemakers who added 2 percent of this or that, saying no one can discern a 2 or 3 or 5 percent addition, but the viognier in the Dragon's Lair lends a softness and roundness to the spicy shiraz and deep, dark mourvedre. The winery's tasting notes describe the Dragon's Lair ($26) as assertive yet approachable. The name comes from the legend of St. George defeating the dragon, a fight that legend also says took place in the same valley where Bellingham wines now are made. The Dragon's Lair is the red counterpart to Bellingham's Fair Maiden, an intriguing blend of chardonnay, chenin blanc, viognier, rousanne, grenache blanc and verdelho. And speaking of ridding the countryside of unwanted dragons, my house is getting ready for the inauguration and we're wondering what might be suitable for marking what's being celebrated as a new beginning (aren't all beginnings new?) in American politics. Something old? Something new? Maybe something local (i.e., Colorado) to celebrate our uniqueness or maybe something from California, Oregon, Virginia, New York or elsewhere to mark our oneness as a nation. Decisions, decisions. Let me know what you're drinking the day Barack Obama takes the oath of office.