It Could Be the Best Wine Book of 2024

Winemaker Larry Brooks is writing a book—It's our lucky day

I’ve never met and I don’t know Larry Brooks, one of America's most accomplished winemakers. And I’m worse off for it. However, I’m in the process of getting to know his mind and his understanding of wine and winemaking, and for this, I am profoundly excited. If you are one of those breeds of wine enthusiasts who pine for intelligent and captivating wine prose, you too should be excited.

Before I go any further, I want you to stop and subscribe to Mr. Brook’s new Substack newsletter, Liquid Geography. At this new online publication, Mr. Brooks will be serializing a book he has been working on for the past several years. He describes the book thusly:

“My goal is to describe in detail the major facets of wine tasting, grape growing, and winemaking in straightforward prose largely free of jargon and without presuming that the reader has scientific training. This book is not intended to be a manual, but there is much practical advice and knowledge based on my more than four decades of hands-on wine growing….At the most basic level this book is meant for those who love wine, and love what it adds to a civilized life…. As this book is intended primarily for professionals the level of detail may at times prove tedious to the amateur.  I have tried my utmost to avoid jargon and to express myself in the plainest possible language. Yet, it is well to keep in mind what Richard Henry Dana states in his introduction to Two Years Before the Mast, “There may be in some parts a good deal that is unintelligible to the general reader.”  Dana believed that by leaving in the esoteric details of the world he was depicting the imagination and curiosity of the reader would be stimulated. I have similar hopes.

Brooks’ book will be serialized weekly, chapter by chapter, on his Substack. The serializing began on January 9 and, good to his word, Brooks now has two installments up, the first a “Welcome”—which is well worth reading—and his first chapter in a section that addresses sensory evaluation.

I discovered Brooks' latest literary contribution by accident. I was reviewing new wine-related substacks. But this is not my first encounter with his writing. Larry Brooks produced the best explanation of “Terroir” I’ve read in more than 30 years of consuming the written word aimed at wine.

Published at Medium in March 2020 under the heading “Terroir in Wine—Somewhereness”, Brooks’ history and evaluation, and exploration of the concept of terroir is so convincingly rendered and chalked so full of genuinely relevant historical references and all backed up by his 40+ years of sampling “Somewhereness”, that one is left with the impression they need not read any more on the subject. The article currently sits at #12 in my list of bookmarks and that should tell you something given that this is a set of Chrome bookmarks I’ve been cultivating for more than a decade and includes instant links to my Substack, my blog, my social media pages, my accounting platform, client websites, and my AI tools.