About Thirst Behavior
Wine is never just wine. It is a social performance, a status symbol, a lifestyle choice, and, increasingly, a form of cultural signaling as potent as the clothes we wear or the places we post from. Thirst Behavior is a newsletter about the rituals of drinking and the ways they reflect larger cultural currents—especially in the Hamptons and New York, where summer leisure and global tastemaking collide.
At the core, this project asks: why do people drink what they drink, and what does it say about the world around them? In practice, that means essays on the aesthetics of rosé and its grip on summer identity; on the semiotics of Champagne and how it became shorthand for both sophistication and excess; on natural wine as a movement that began with farmers and outcasts and now finds itself embraced by elites. Each bottle carries not only flavor and technique but also context, aspiration, and contradiction. To write about wine is to write about culture in motion and the fluidity of significance.
But Thirst Behavior is not a trade journal or a consumer magazine—it is a hybrid. Part cultural criticism, part insider tip sheet, part love letter to the strangeness of hospitality. The free Friday essays explore big themes: how drinking rituals shift with fashion, how service culture shapes social behavior, how global economics (like tariffs or climate change) trickle down into the glass you hold at dinner. Alongside, the paid editions provide a more utilitarian guide: bottles to watch, restaurants worth visiting, articles worth reading. This is the social agenda for people who care not only about what’s in their glass but about how taste itself gets made.
What makes Thirst Behavior different is the vantage point. Written by someone who has worked as a sommelier, a wine director, a consultant, and a critic of culture, it combines lived service-world knowledge with a writer’s instinct for larger patterns. The goal is to bridge the back-of-house and the front-of-house, the professional and the amateur, the insider and the curious onlooker. It seeks to understand the wine list as a cultural document, the wine bar as a sociological text.
For young wine professionals, this is a resource: a place to sharpen perspective, to learn how to talk about bottles in ways that connect, to think critically about the culture you are helping to shape. For the broader reading public, it’s an invitation: a way to understand the secret language of hospitality, to feel in on the joke, to take part in a conversation that often feels closed off.
Why subscribe? Because taste is never neutral, and neither are the rituals that surround it. Because wine has become a lens for status, identity, and aspiration in the same way fashion, music, and art have. And because being literate in the culture of drinking—knowing not just what to order, but what it means to order it—is increasingly part of cultural fluency.
Thirst Behavior is not simply about wine. It is about what wine reveals: about class and aspiration, about performance and pleasure, about the peculiar human drive to find meaning in what we consume. It is a chronicle of how taste gets made, and how, in turn, taste remakes us.
