This is the story of a mom-and-pop winery. Adam Lee and Dianna Novy met cute when he was wine buyer for the Nieman Marcus store in Dallas and she worked in its epicure department.

''We fell in love in nice restaurants drinking fine wine,'' Adam says.

In the romantic glow, they dreamed of moving to California and making wine themselves. So they did. In 1994, after working as cellar rats for a few years at small wineries in Sonoma County, they pooled their savings (her $21,000, his $3,000) and purchased one acre of vines in the Anderson Valley.

They worked that acre themselves, pruning, thinning, harvesting. They did their first fermentation by buying time at a winery. The fruits of their labors: 107 cases of their favorite wine -- pinot noir.

In the glow of that, Adam proposed to Dianna.

With the chutzpah of beginners, they managed to get a bottle of their brand new stuff to the influential wine writer Robert Parker. He gave them a score of 90 in his Wine Advocate, and they were off and running.

They named their winery Siduri, after the Babylonian goddess of wine. Today, it produces 8,000 cases a year of pinot noirs from grapes that grow in plots they've purchased in 20 vineyards stretching from Santa Barbara in the south to Oregon's Willamette Valley.

They dash from vineyard to vineyard, supervising trellising, canopy management, cluster thinning and so on. They drive the Ryder trucks that bring the grapes to a Santa Rosa industrial park to what Adam calls ``the least bucolic winery in California.''

They ferment each vineyard's grapes separately to preserve their individuality, selling some as single-vineyard wines, blending others just before bottling.

They hew to the philosophy that great wine is made in the vineyard, and that only the gentlest treatment should be given in the winery. Still, they're not above tinkering.

With the powerful Garys' Vineyard pinot noir, for example, they use four kinds of yeast (native, barolo, grenache and RC212, if you care) and, when 2006 turned out to be a large crop, which can dilute flavor, they bled off 10 percent of the juice, leaving that much less to be flavored by the skins, creating a richer wine.

Adam and Dianna are literally mom and pop now, to Christian, 9, Amber, 5, and Truett, 2, making for a full if not aways romantic life.

''It's hard, to be honest,'' says Adam. ``Now, when we go to a restaurant, we have to order somebody else's wine -- a barbaresco or a priorato or something. If we order our own, we start talking about it, and it becomes work.''

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

• 2006 Siduri Pinot Noir, 'Garys' Vineyard,'' Santa Lucia Highlands: smoky oak, deep black cherry and earth flavors; rich and smooth; $49.

RECOMMENDED

• 2006 Siduri Pinot Noir, ``Sonatera Vineyard,'' Sonoma Coast: oaky aromas; flavors of black raspberries and black coffee; firm tannin; $49.

• 2006 Siduri Pinot Noir, Sonoma Coast: hint of oak; black cherry and black coffee flavors; ripe tannins; $29.

• 2006 Siduri Pinot Noir, ``Terra de Promissio Vineyard,'' Sonoma Coast: black cherry and black raspberry aromas and flavors; hint of earth; $46.

• 2006 Siduri Pinot Noir, Santa Lucia Highlands: hint of oak; black plums and black coffee; smooth and medium-bodied; $33.

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