Wellsprings: A Natural History of Bottled Spring Waters by Francis H. Chapelle

This book is about more than sparkling water, but it gives the geological “prequel” to what you taste in a glass or bottle. Chapelle focuses on how spring waters are formed, moving through specific rock layers over long time scales, picking up minerals that become the backbone of flavor and texture. The emphasis is on aquifers, recharge cycles, and mineral dissolution as the real drivers of what later gets bottled, sold, and tasted by people like you and me. For sparkling water tasters like me, it explains why waters feel different before carbonation even enters the picture: softness and minerality are already infused by the source, resulting in what we call terrior. He also shows how stability of a spring affects consistency of the taste across time, which is key when comparing brands. Even the water from the same source can change over decades.