Wine

No wine name seems more of a misnomer than Piedmont’s dolcetto, which in Italian means “little sweet one.” Piedmont does make sweet wines, like Asti Spumante and Brachetto d’Acqui, but dolcetto is a very dry red wine made from a namesake early-ripening, low-acid workhorse grape that grows easily in soil where the more refined nebbiolo does poorly. Dolcetto is sweet only in the colloquial sense of the ripeness of its grapes and softness of its tannins.

Ray Walker was happily employed as a financial adviser at Merrill Lynch & Co. in San Francisco until a gulp of wine coerced him into leaving for France to buy $140,000 worth of grapes with a dream to rival powerhouse Burgundy domaines such as Romanee-Conti and Corton-Andre.

Ziggy, a golden Labrador trained to sniff out bad wine corks, is showing off his tricks at Sojourn Cellars ’ tasting salon in Sonoma.