Editor’s note: “Dispatches” are occasional snapshots of people, places, scenes or moments from around Georgia that our reporters encounter.

FORT VALLEY — Ask Tyler Wainwright to show you how to pick out the perfect peach and he will tell you as best he can. He can spot one in a flash.

But explaining the way he does it is a little like describing the secret to a magic trick, which still requires plenty of practice to pull off.

Wainwright, 33, grew up in a peach-farming family in Taylor County in the heart of Georgia peach country. He studied marketing and finance at Georgia Southern, but his knack for knowing when to pick the sun-reddened fruit comes from years in the orchards.

“Peach juice runs through his veins,” says Wendy Barton, one of his co-workers at Lane Southern Orchards in neighboring Peach County.

On a recent afternoon inside the century-old company’s bustling, air-conditioned retail market along Ga. 96 below Mossy Creek, Wainwright shrugs this off and says, “I don’t know about that.”

When a visitor asks him how to select a perfect peach, he sidles over to a prominent display of Sunprinces. Some had been on trees the day before. Beneath lights in Lane’s shop, which is part showroom, part agritourism mecca, the peaches, some almost as plump as softballs, glowed at center stage, more fire than fuzz.

A bin of peaches on display in mid-July in the market shop at Lane Southern Orchards in Peach County. (Joe Kovac Jr./AJC)

In seconds, Wainwright chooses one. He probes its girth, sizing it up, gripping it the way a pitcher might grasp a curveball. It had been grown just west of the Flint River among the 6,000 or so acres his family tends across this region to produce Georgia’s official fruit.

On sight, he knew the very field it hailed from. (Theirs typically show up at Southern retailers within about three days, and make it to consumers’ homes within five.)

This time of year, as the region’s peach harvest winds down, some of the tastiest varieties find their way to roadside stands and supermarkets. But why had Wainwright, who makes his living on logistics and timing — sending which peaches to market and when — chosen this one?

Inspecting the fruit as he strides toward the market’s cafe, he mentions that it is “soft all around, good size, it’s ripe. It’s not oddly shaped.”

He picks up a plastic knife and a napkin from the condiment counter and sits down at a table. Then he carves into the peach, juice dripping onto the napkin as he slices a ring around its pit, splitting the fruit in two, squeezing its skin.

“It’s got a little bit of give,” he says. “It’s not mushy. This peach is ready to eat.”

Then he takes a bite and says, “What I like about peaches from this region — you know, any grower in Georgia — you’ve got a really good amount of juice and give.”

He says that peaches shipped from, say, Chile or even other parts of the U.S. have to be picked when they’re still quite firm, to extend shelf life, and that the meat of those peaches won’t have time to mature and be as succulent. “It’ll be really mealy and dry,” he says.

Those peaches from far-flung locales can spend a couple of weeks in transit and are rarely so juicy. Which makes consumers in these parts lucky for their proximity. Farmers can grow and ship peaches swiftly and, says Wainwright, “make it taste like a peach from your backyard.”

What should a perfect-peach seeker look for?

“If you look at the peach where the stem goes in,” Wainwright says, “you want a good background color. Even if it’s yellow. It doesn’t have to be red. But you don’t want to see dark green.”

Green can mean a peach was picked a tad early.

“Color, firmness, you want a little bit of give, but not overripe,” Wainwright says. “And if they are hard and firm, put some on your counter, some maybe outside in the shade, and you can manipulate how fast they ripen.”

He says not to put them in the sun. A covered porch will do. Wainwright says that, like tomatoes, peaches will, after they’re harvested, continue ripening and softening. To a point.

“But,” he notes, “they won’t have the big transformation like a tomato.”