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To call North Georgia a Little Napa Valley would be a bit much, but vineyards and wineries have prospered around here since the 1980s.

The largest and best known is Château Élan in Braselton. Along with the vineyard operation, those guys have a major golf resort and conference center. People get married inside the Château on the grand staircase. The complex is surrounded by several square miles of gated communities.

The other local wineries are less Taj Mahalish, but still, the Piedmont region is home to quite a few of them.

When most people hear the words wine and Georgia, they probably think of some syrupy concoction Cousin Billy made from muscadines or scuppernongs. The mere thought of it puts my teeth on edge.

But the fact is, most of the local wines are not cloyingly sweet. Muscadines aplenty grow here, and the obligatory peach wine is produced, but the grapes primarily cultivated locally are your typical Merlots, Cabernets, Chardonnays, Rieslings, and so on.

I’m no authority on this subject. I know very little about wines and grapes, and I’ve only tried a few of the local wines. Frankly, most of them were memorable for being mediocre, or worse. I’m just telling it like it is.

Back in the mid-1990s, I saw an ad in Atlanta Magazine for Chestnut Mountain Winery in Braselton. The ad bragged about their great wine-making skill and the numerous awards they had won. They had a wine-tasting coming up soon, so I decided to check them out.

Like most of the local operations, Chestnut Mountain Winery consisted of a modest vineyard and one drab metal shed where the work was done. On the day of the wine-tasting, they set up a few canopies in front of the shed where us visitors could sit, sip, chat, and if we were feeling generous, purchase a few bottles of product.

No one was allowed inside the shed. The contents of the shed were proprietary. Top secret.

About 50 yards from the metal shed was the parking area, which was a large treeless field covered in fine, dry grass about six inches tall. The grass was suffering greatly from all the traffic, but wine-tastings were only held two or three times a year. The field would recover.

So I parked, followed the path through the woods to the big event, and proceeded to sit, sip, and chat. As I recall, 50-75 people were there.

An hour or so later, having sampled my fair share of the winery’s wares, I had a pretty good buzz on. The heat and sun amplified it, and suddenly, a voice inside my head spoke, saying, time to call it a day, dude.

Grudgingly, I bought one bottle of something and headed for the car.

When I got there, the mid-afternoon sun was high, and the open field was hot hot hot. All I wanted to do was get in my car and turn on the air conditioning.

Before I could start the engine, I heard a loud backfire.

I glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw, on the far side of the field, an Oldsmobile convertible surrounded by a thin cloud of white smoke.

Yep. That was the source of the backfire. I started my engine and prepared to leave.

As I pulled away, I noticed that the cloud of smoke was still hovering around the convertible. Several people were standing next to it, talking in an animated fashion.

Then I spotted the flames dancing underneath the convertible. The heat of the engine had set the dry grass on fire.

By the time I jumped out and ran over to the convertible, the flames were larger. I could feel the heat as I approached.

One of the onlookers was yelling that we needed to roll the car away from the flames, pronto. The owner jumped behind the wheel and put the car in neutral. The rest of us began pushing.

We got the car out of the patch of burning grass successfully, but as the car rolled forward, it set more grass on fire.

Our little team of four or five rescuers paused to think. For the record, all of us were just leaving a wine-tasting. We weren’t at our problem-solving best.

Suddenly, someone shouted, “There!” and pointed to a patch of bare dirt at the edge of the field. Instantly, we began pushing the vehicle toward it.

We set ablaze a 20-yard-long swath of grass in the process, but we got the car onto safe ground. We hastily retreated, in case it decided to explode, and left the vehicle to its fate.

By then, another handful of half-inebriated people had arrived to help. Without a word, we all set about the task of stomping out the flaming grass.

It must have been quite a spectacle — 10 or 12 tipsy strangers, dancing and tramping furiously. In a perfect world, a fiddler would have accompanied us, playing Turkey in the Straw.

Within a few minutes, the grass fire was out. The Oldsmobile was no longer in danger. The situation was under control.

I looked down at my white Reeboks. They were black.

But enough about grass fires.

At first, you have to wonder why so many vintners chose to set up shop in North Georgia, which gets a heck of a lot of rain. As you may know, too much water is detrimental to a vineyard. As the vintners say, grapevines don’t like wet feet.

And I’m not kidding about abundant rainfall. Rabun County, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, is a virtual rain forest. Rabun gets 70 inches of rain a year. Atlanta gets 50. Talk about wet feet.

On the other hand, the higher altitude of the Piedmont region brings with it a very important advantage: fewer bugs.

We Piedmont folk reside on a high plateau. We are above the Fall Line — so named because it’s the location of (duh) numerous waterfalls. These occur where the south-flowing rivers drop from the Piedmont Plateau onto the coastal plain below.

Down South, the Fall Line is known as the Gnat Belt. That’s because gnats, mosquitoes, and other pesky insects thrive in the hot, humid conditions of the coastal plain. The Fall Line is their natural limit.

Unfortunately, the wind carries some of them up here anyway.

The Fall Line/Gnat Belt is easy to locate. Place a ruler on a map of Georgia. Draw a line from Augusta on the Savannah River, through Milledgeville on the Oconee River, through Macon on the Ocmulgee River, to Columbus on the Chattahoochee River.

You’ve just drawn a straight line from NE to SW that identifies the Fall Line/Gnat Belt. It also illustrates that in the pioneer days, a lot of cities were founded at the limit of upstream navigation.

But enough about gnats.

In North Georgia, because of the scarcity of insect pests — indeed, a surprising lack of bothersome bugs in general — the vineyards are easier to protect, less likely to succumb to pests, and less susceptible to the diseases they spread.

In the world of grape-growing and wine-making, one of the most feared insect pests is the glassy-winged sharpshooter, which is a cicada — a leafhopper.

When sharpshooters feed on a grapevine, a bacterium is introduced that prevents water from being drawn into the tissue of the vine. This condition is Pierce’s Disease, and the vine will die within a couple of years. There is no known cure.

And, even here on the Piedmont, the worst can happen.

10 years ago, not long after I attended the wine-tasting, Pierce’s Disease struck at Chestnut Mountain Winery.

Slowly, the vineyards died.

Slowly, so did the winery. Within a year or two, the place went out of business.

The atrium at Château Élan, the alpha winery.

The vineyards at Habersham Winery.

Georgia at a glance.

Homalodisca coagulata, the glassy-winged sharpshooter.

A grapevine with Pierce’s Disease.