David Bedford doesn't just eat an apple.

He approaches one, observes its colors, determines if it's ripe, bites into it, feels its textures, swallows its juices and spits out its pulp. Then, he decides its fate.

"OK, you're just keeping your head above water," Bedford told one tree last week after biting into a few of its offspring. "It's your lucky day."

Bedford is the University of Minnesota's apple breeder -- more specifically, a fruit crops scientist at the U's Horticultural Research Center at the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum in Chanhassen.

In the fall, his busy season, he spends most of his workday among the dwarf and full-size trees he's bred and grown. He rates them -- categories include vigor, hardiness, bloom -- in a small green binder whose pages have the texture and antique quality of library cards. In one day, he'll walk 7 miles and taste 500 to 600 apples.

Bedford is celebrated and interviewed for his most famous discovery, the Honeycrisp. The apple is the U's bestseller, and more than 5 million of its trees have been planted around the world. But such a superstar apple comes along once in decades.

Bedford has a metaphor for this, as he does for pretty much every part of the breeding process:

"If breeding is a baseball game, the Honeycrisp was a home run with the bases loaded," he said. "If you're constantly swinging for those homers, you're going to strike out a lot."

More recently, Bedford and the U have been hitting more ground balls.

They've released Snowsweet, a rich, sweet variety with white flesh. "A double," Bedford said. The Zestar, which the U released to nurseries and orchards in 1999, was a triple.

Soon, the U will introduce a single, the MN-447.

The MN-447 was never intended for commercial release, and even now is meant only for limited availability at a limited number of orchards. It's small, often cracks at its top, and its taste is likened to such odd flavors as Hawaiian Punch, molasses and "raw sugarcane on steroids," Bedford said.

Because it's unusually cold-hardy and has a distinct flavor, the U has used it in breeding since the 1930s. It's a parent to the Sweet 16 and the Keepsake and a grandparent of the Honeycrisp.

On its own, though, the apple has few admirers. It always performs "terribly" in taste tests; one or two testers in 20 might give it high marks.

But those one or two are a new focus in apple breeding. "Everyone's caught on to the idea of niche markets," said James Luby, professor of horticulture science and Bedford's supervisor. "We're long past the stage where apples are sold as either red, green or yellow."

Bedford grew up during that stage. He always liked fruit, but remembers dreading the days he'd open his lunch box to discover a Red Delicious, then the industry standard.

"Why couldn't it have been a grape, a banana?" he said. "An apple -- you couldn't even trade an apple."

Still today, Bedford bemoans the Red Delicious, which "may not be the enemy, but is the antagonist." All apples, he said, can be judged on their levels of sweet and tart. Red Delicious apples have very little sweet and non-existent tart, he said, using a hand to illustrate each.