"This is the last of it," says David Bruce, splashing into glasses some petite sirah he's just siphoned from a barrel in the cellar of his eponymous winery in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Just a year old, the wine is inky and firm, but in smell and flavor it resonates with sweet, jammy fruit sprinkled generously with black pepper.

It's one of the more expressive wines we've tasted all day, but once it's bottled and released that will be the end of David Bruce's petite sirah, which he's been making since 1970. He's replacing it with more vines of his first love, pinot noir.

"A special clone," he slyly mentions.

That's the David Bruce way – "constant, constant, constant experimentation," and then don't say too much about what you've found that works.

His ceaseless quest to produce the world's best pinot noir has led to some uneven bottlings over the years, but his wines have been on target often enough and long enough that they account in large measure for the varietal's high esteem in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

Bruce, lean and ruddy, with straight, silver hair and bright, blue eyes, has been making wine since 1956. That's when he was in Portland, Ore., doing his residency after graduating from Stanford University's medical school. The wine was a homemade batch squeezed from Concord grapes.

Soon he was back in the Bay Area, completing an internship at a San Francisco hospital, when for $7.50 – "A $2 wine was expensive back then" – he bought a 1954 Richebourg from France's Burgundy.

That wine – "The whole room was pervaded by its floral and spicy aroma" – and the reading he'd been doing about the pinot noirs of Burgundy sent him on a pilgrimage to find the best place in California to cultivate the varietal.

He didn't have to go far, just down the San Francisco peninsula to the Santa Cruz Mountains, where pioneer vintner Martin Ray was making what Bruce considered the best pinot noir in the state.

In 1961, Bruce bought a 40-acre parcel along Bear Creek Road about 2,100 feet above Los Gatos and began to clear land and plant grapes. Three years later, he established his winery, and ever since he's been restlessly tweaking vineyard and cellar practices to produce ever-better pinot noir.

"It took me 20 years before I was satisfied with our pinot noir," he says during a tasting that included his rich yet lithe 2005 Santa Cruz Mountains pinot noir ($45) and his earthier and more supple 2004 Santa Cruz Mountains estate pinot noir ($75).

He practiced dermatology until 1985, and since retiring from medicine has pursued pinot noir even more passionately. His belief that nothing beats bare feet for crushing grapes – "The human body is too soft to bruise and break the seeds" – led to one of several inventions aimed at pampering fruit as it is transformed into wine.

What he seeks in pinot noir is dense color – "Color is the engine that pulls the pinot noir train," he's fond of saying – plus fruit-forward flavors and a velveteen texture.

That search has prompted him to secure pinot-noir grapes from several other California regions that do well by the varietal, such as Santa Lucia Highlands in Monterey County and Anderson Valley in Mendocino County.

In pulling fruit from other districts, he's acknowledging three things. One is the popularity of pinot noir. Another is that little land is available for the cultivation of grapes in the Santa Cruz Mountains. And the third is his recognition that pinot noir performs quite well in other California regions.

Not long ago Bruce even bought an 18-acre pinot noir vineyard in Sonoma County's Russian River Valley.

"It allows us to escape from here for an evening or two," he says.

But he continues to return home. He isn't giving up on the Santa Cruz Mountains for pinot noir, even if other areas might have more space and less-challenging growing conditions.

"Today, it would be easier to go someplace else, but that would take the lust out of life," says Bruce.

Thus, the petite sirah comes out, and more pinot noir goes in.

Call The Bee's Mike Dunne, (916) 321-1143. Back columns: www.sacbee.com/dunne.