Larry Brooks, longtime winemaker, consultant and writer, admits he’s taken a “deep dive” with his book, “Liquid Geography,” published in serial form on Substack.

Brooks, a resident of San Luis Obispo County who has made wine in California for more than 40 years, hopes his book is a comprehensive text on wine tasting, grape growing and winemaking.

While he’s “always been a book worm” who loves reading and writing, and has worked in public relations for several wineries as a “hobby,” this new endeavor is Brooks’ first foray into professional publishing.

“Liquid Geography,” published on Substack one chapter at a time, details wine tasting, grape growing and wine production in an easy-to-read format suitable for the general public as well as wine aficionados.

While he doesn’t consider his book to be a manual, it “is packed with practical advice and knowledge based on my more than four decades of hands-on wine growing,” Brooks said.

In 1979, he started his winemaking career at Acacia Winery in the Carneros appellation of Napa Valley. While at Acacia, Brooks was responsible for all aspects of vineyard management, winemaking and sales.

From Acacia, Brooks became CEO and vice president of winemaking for the Chalone Wine Group in the mid 1990s.

While managing five wineries under the CWG umbrella, Brooks also led the label Echelon, steered acquisition and development at Washington’s Sagelands and Provenance in Napa.

In 2000, he started consulting for several wineries and, in 2006, joined San Luis Obispo County’s Tolosa Winery as its fulltime winemaker and general manager, titles he filled until 2015.

Also in 2000, Brooks founded Campion Wines in the Santa Lucia Highlands AVA, a label that focuses on chardonnay and pinot noir. While he’s since sold the winery, he’s still making its wines.

Today, Brooks consults with several wineries across the state, and lectures in sensory evaluation at both Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and California State University, Fresno.
In 2012, a viticulture and enology instructor retired from Cal Poly, leaving the university short for its sensory evaluation class, and Brooks stepped up to teach it.

“I wrote my own syllabus for that class,” which contained a mix of students from the marketing and enology components of the greater program. “No one had scientific backgrounds. So I took a dive into the science of sensory evaluation.”

Fresno State then approached him to teach an advanced sensory analysis class, and he led two there over the course of about a year.

Cooking goes hand in hand with the senses, and since grad school, Brooks has been a devout chef.

“I’ve always been fascinated by cooking,” he said. “I consider winemaking to be cooking at slow speed, and cooking really is just sped-up winemaking.”

While Brooks prefers “simple foods” as ingredients for a meal, he favors “an amalgam” of French and Italian menus, Asian food, curries and has a knack for baking bread.

“I’m a savory cook,” he said. Basically, “I learned to cook so that I could throw dinner parties.”

While he was still with Tolosa, “my wife, Heidi, had bugged me to write a book,” he recalled. So post Tolosa, Brooks started writing each morning and within six months had his first draft. Picking his subject was easy: “What I know best is what I wrote. Nothing has ever been written by a winemaker about wine.”

“Liquid Geography” comprises three sections and 20 chapters. Brooks described Substack as “awesome” for its “journalist-heavy” content and accessibility for writer and readers alike. However, as with wine, one “still has to go out and ‘sell’ the book” to the public.

Tom Wark, author of Fermentation Wine Blog, calls Brooks “thorough and very thoughtful, and his work on winemaking and wine tasting reflects this disposition.”

“’Liquid Geography’ is turning out to be one of the most important works on the confluence of winemaking and tasting wine that we have seen in decades,” Wark said.

Brooks plans to publish another book, still untitled, on the wine industry and climate change. He said he’s previously written for Wine Business Monthly on the “slow aspect” of climate change.

Read “Liquid Geography” at https://larrybrooks.substack.com/p/welcome.