Kristin Collins, Staff Writer

In California, wine country means oak barrels, cavernous tasting rooms and delicate stemware.
In North Carolina, it often looks a little more like Jim Ward's place: a few acres of spindly grapevines and a garage cluttered with pesticide sprayers, grape crushers and jugs of homemade wine.

Ward is one of a new crop of Tar Heel farmers who are banking on a future in wine. Thanks to these optimistic wine lovers -- many of whom come from office jobs and had never grown anything more than a potted plant -- wineries are opening in droves and tender grape shoots are sprouting in every region of the state.

"I just drank a lot of wine," Ward, 57, said of his qualifications to start a vineyard.

Since planting grapes four years ago on a family farm in Durham County, Ward has battled deer and birds, which like to feast on his grapes. He has lost a good chunk of his vineyard to disease. He has spent more than $40,000 and nearly every free moment, when he's not working full-time at SAS. And he is still years from making any money.

This business, he is learning, isn't all about tastings on the verandah.

Gill Giese, who teaches viticulture -- a fancy word for grape growing -- at Surry Community College, is in the heart of the state's burgeoning wine industry, the Yadkin Valley. He says he constantly fields questions from novices who want to start their own wineries.

"People have their mind made up before they get here," Giese said. "They've been to France or California. They've drunk some wine with their friends, and it's very romantic."

In the past five years, the number of wineries in the state has jumped from fewer than 20 to more than 50 -- most of them selling European-style wines, not the sweet muscadine wines made from native grapes. In just the past two years, the state's grape acreage has increased by a third.

What some of these new farmers don't understand until they get into the business, Giese said, is that growing grapes, even varieties with names like Chambourcin and Vidal Blanc, is still farming. It's dirty, labor-intensive, expensive and full of risk -- especially in North Carolina's wet climate.

Hope against the odds

Agricultural experts used to say that European bunch grapes, used in wines such as Chardonnay and Merlot, were a terrible fit with North Carolina's humidity.

North Carolina gets an average of 40 to 90 inches of rain a year, depending on the region, much of it during prime grape-growing season. By comparison, California's wine country gets 25 inches, nearly all of it in winter.

Moisture makes the grapes susceptible to all kinds of diseases: black rot, bitter rot, downy mildew, powdery mildew, the experts said. And they weren't wrong.

Grape farmers struggle with all those problems. They must spray pesticides every week to keep fungi off their vines, compared with a half-dozen times a year in drier climates.

Growers also have discovered a scourge no one predicted.

Vineyards in much of the state are susceptible to Pierce's Disease, caused by untreatable bacteria that choke off a plant's nutrient supply and can kill a whole vineyard in five years. While that disease isn't specific to North Carolina -- it has caused huge problems in California -- it is harder to control in warm climates. And unlike California, this state has little money for research to help growers prevent and manage the disease.

Wine connoisseurs debate whether North Carolina can grow wines as tasty as those made from grapes grown in dry climates. Experts say the best vintages are always made after dry years.

But despite its pitfalls, the wine business has become a major hope for a state desperate for new rural businesses. Encouraged by growing wine industries in places such as Virginia and Washington state, universities, community colleges, foundations and state government are sinking money into the venture.

New crop of farmers

Michael Zimmerman, whose family has owned land in Davidson County since 1895, planted grapes where corn and soybeans once grew. Zimmerman, a financial adviser in Winston-Salem, said he became convinced of the industry's promise when the state's largest winery, Childress Vineyards, went up in Davidson County in 2004. In a few years, he hopes to pass on a 20-acre vineyard and tasting room to his two grown children.

In the meantime, his nine acres of vines are sucking up every moment of his spare time. He's battling mildew and investing in equipment for the promise of profits that are years off. He said he never imagined how much work a few acres of grapes could be.

"I didn't realize there's a vineyard boot camp you have to go through," said Zimmerman, 59. "It's every night, every weekend. You're out there sometimes at dawn. You're usually out there until it's dark."

For the most part, the state's traditional farmers haven't jumped on the wine bandwagon.

Perhaps that's because it costs $10,000 to $15,000 an acre to get started growing grapes. Then, it takes three years to get a full harvest and, in most cases, more than a decade to make any money. Building a winery is an even bigger investment and requires some skill in winemaking.

What's more, grapes require so much hand-training, pruning and disease control that as few as three or four acres is a full-time job.

"I've sat in some seminars where they went over the cost structure," said David Blackwell, a commercial pilot who planted a vineyard last year in Yadkin County. "You'd have the tobacco farmers sitting in the back, and they'd get up and walk out."

Several of the state's most successful wineries were started by people such as Lee Griffin, owner of Rockhouse Vineyards in Tryon. "I'd never even grown a tomato before we started this," said Griffin, who also owns a textile machinery business.

Many grape growers and vineyard owners are coming to the point where they will have to make a profit or call it quits. At least one vineyard in Davidson County is in bankruptcy.

It's all part of striving to create something new, Giese said. If the wine industry succeeds here, he said, it will be because people took risks and ignored the odds.

"John Smith, who came to the New World, had never been here before," Giese said. "The men who walked on the moon had never been there before. Was that a good thing?"

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