Paolo Bea in Plastic Cups
Thirst Behavior No. 004
It’s July 4th in the Hamptons, and road rage rages in the Round Swamp parking lot.
This week: I’m talking about the Sisyphean task of selling natural wine in a market allergic to risk, drinking Paolo Bea out of plastic cups on the beach, the moodboardification of summer beverages, and a few wines (and places) actually worth caring about. We’ll touch on strawberry matcha, bitterness, spiritual successors to the Arnold Palmer, and the subtle art of wanting more.
In the Hamptons, everything is an aesthetic decision.
This is a place where people crave novelty but fear real change. A place where the pursuit of what is coolest is earnest, but the taste for it is quite shallow. It’s not that people don’t want to be seen at the cutting edge—they do. But by the time July hits, the appetite for discovery gets flattened by the need to perform summer itself. People are overextended, overexposed, and eager to settle into a version of leisure that doesn’t ask much of them. Even the edgiest dressers still want their rosé to taste like a spa day.
That’s the contradiction I run into every week: trying to get natural wine—wines with character—into glasses across a region where taste is everything and also nothing. The Hamptons are culturally porous. People come here to collect a kind of status residue, to participate in something ambiently fashionable without having to think too hard about why. It makes for a strange push-pull: the appetite for “better” things is there, but the space to encounter them is not.
And it’s not just the consumers. Restaurants and retail accounts are just as boxed in. I recently showed a prospective buyer a lineup that included a northern Italian Sauvignon Blanc, a Muscadet, a Rosso di Montepulciano, and a California Cabernet. They told me, flat out, that they needed “wines with more commercial viability.” What?? In what universe are those not commercially viable selections? Many of these seasonal spots aren’t actually restaurants in the traditional sense—they’re social stages with a beverage component. The food is bait. The restaurant is front for whatever nightlife concept they’re trying to sell. You bring people in with a buzzy chef and a few recognizable producers, and you make your money on the back end: bottle service, magnums, cocktails served with sparklers. It’s not so much a hospitality model, but a conversion funnel.
And that’s why so many products launch here in the first place. The Hamptons, like Aspen or West Palm, aren’t just playgrounds for the wealthy; they’re testing grounds for cultural transfer. The assumption is that if you can get a product in the right hands out here—if the right girl holds the can on the right beach at the right time—it will follow her home, reenter the city, and start to shape the behavior of her peers. Brand visibility is a more valuable currency than actual money. That’s why all these goofy, VC-backed nonsense products get tested out here (Mezcal from the actors from Breaking Bad, a canned gin and soda, endless iterations on the weed gummy): no one expects them to last, just to be seen long enough to catch on. And if they don’t, on to the next one.
And yet I keep at it, every week. Not because natural wine is some kind of lifestyle gospel—I don’t care if you identify as a natty wine person—but because I believe in drinking wines that taste like something. Wines that are alive, sometimes unruly, occasionally raw, often restrained, and almost always more interesting than whatever gets poured at Sunset Beach. If you're just here for a vodka soda, godspeed. But if you're drinking wine, I'd love you to drink something that is, at least in some sense, real.
Good Coffee, Finally!
Do Not Feed Alligators is the coffee pop-up tucked behind Cynthia Rowley in Montauk.
They’re doing something rare out here: serving real-deal espresso drinks in a space that actually feels considered—without the line-out-the-door performance art you get at most other spots. If you’ve ever been caught in a holding pattern at Left Hand between a group of hungover girlies ‘dead’ from SoulCycle and a guy who can’t decide between an iced latte and a White Claw, you know what an oasis this place is. The drinks are good. The people are nice. No one’s trying to manufacture a vibe. It’s just a backyard with a real espresso machine and a little style. That alone sets it apart.
Still, even Alligators hasn’t escaped the seasonal creep of the strawberry matcha.
What is it with these pastel beverages? Strawberry matcha. Ube cold foam. That new one I saw recently: lemonade with condensed milk. All these hybrid drinks are soft-edged and camera-ready, designed as much for the grid, but not for the gut. They look like wellness but taste like ice cream.
I’m not mad at it, but i am curious how we got here. There’s something going on at the level of moodboard marketing that keeps generating these drinks. They’re photogenic, performatively “better for you,” and vaguely globalized in a way that feels contemporary but placeless. The flavor is secondary to the signal.
But coffee used to be bitter, didn’t it?
Plastic Cups and Paolo Bea
Bitterness can be refreshing!
Think about iced tea. That gentle tannic grip that grounds the flavor on your palate? That’s bitterness doing its job. It keeps sweetness in check, sharpens perception, and adds structure to otherwise watery pleasures. It’s why unsweetened tea feels clean. It’s why your mouth feels more awake after a sip. In wine, too, bitterness often shows up in the form of tannin—those grippy little molecules that come from skins, seeds, and stems. They bind to proteins in your saliva, which is why they leave your mouth feeling dry. That dryness, counterintuitively, can make a wine feel more quenching. It gives the liquid shape.
The other afternoon, I spent the day at the beach with friends, where Arnold Palmers eased the transition from daytime hydration to golden hour aperitif. A perfect summer drink: half lemonade, half iced tea. Citrus and tannin. Brightness and bitterness. And then, when we’d had our fill of that, my friend pulled out a bottle of Paolo Bea ‘Arboreus’, a skin-contact Trebbiano Spoletino from Umbria. We poured it straight into the plastic cups, right over the remaining ice.
You wouldn’t think a structured, tannic orange wine would work in that setting, but it really hit. The Arboreus had all the brightness of our Arnold Palmers, but with a deeper golden hue, a cooling herbal tension, and that same gently drying finish—only more complex, more grown-up. It felt like a continuation of the same refreshment logic, but stretched and deepened and transfigured.
Arboreus is one of those wines that reminds you what skin-contact is supposed to be about. It’s not orange for orange’s sake. It’s not cloudy because that’s what sells. It’s a wine with history and texture and patience. Made from Trebbiano Spoletino, a native Umbrian variety, Arboreus sees extended skin maceration and long aging in steel. The result is tactile and luminous: apricot pit, golden apple, chamomile, salt, a little fennel pollen, a lot of presence. It feels both ancient and modern. It wants to be drunk slowly.
And it comes from a producer who helped make this kind of wine possible in the first place. Paolo Bea is one of the original voices of natural winemaking in Italy—not loud, but foundational. He’s farmed organically since the 1980s, relies on native yeasts, avoids additives, and lets his wines take their time in both barrel and bottle. He doesn’t do marketing. His labels are covered in handwritten fine print. He doesn’t chase zero-zero purism either—just balance, transparency, and soul. Drinking Bea’s skin contact wines is a great way to familiarize yourself with the category, if you’re still wondering what all the fuss is about.
Other Things Worth Drinking
If you’re after wines with personality—not just flavor, but feel—here are a couple bottles worth seeking out while you're out east:
Sag Harbor Tavern is low-key one of the best places to drink a bottle that doesn’t feel like a compromise. They’ve got Alexander Hote VdF Rouge, a southern French red from a 70-year-old vineyard planted to Carignan and Grenache. The site sits on a sandy slope over limestone bedrock, and the wine is made with whole-cluster fermentation, long carbonic maceration, full malolactic conversion, and zero filtration—classic natural wine moves, but done with grace. The resulting wine has a deep aubergine color, soft tannins, and a mouthful of warm spice. Alex calls it “a long, happy persistence,” which is exactly right. It’s chillable but not flimsy, structured without being stiff. A southern Rhone wine with real charm. Try it with the burger.
Bird on the Roof, just off Main Street in Montauk, continues to sneak some great stuff onto their list without making a big deal out of it. One such curiosity is Mas Gomà ‘Albé al Turó’ Pét-Nat Rosado, a traditional-method sparkler from the Penedès region of Spain made by the Vendrell family, who’ve been farming the estate since 1918. The wine is 50/50 Garnatxa and Xarel·lo from a single organic, biodynamic vineyard—some of the vines over 70 years old. After a brief skin contact maceration, it ferments spontaneously with wild yeasts and spends six months on the lees in stainless steel before being bottled and disgorged with no fining, filtering, or added sulfites.
What I’m Really Pushing
This whole project—it’s not just about drinking better wine (because what does that even mean?), but cultivating better taste. Not in the old, gatekept sense of connoisseurship, but in the looser, lived-in way taste actually works: as a series of small decisions made in context, in conversation, and under pressure. One foot in pleasure, the other in performance.
Everyone wants to be seen drinking the right thing, but no one wants to be first. The Hamptons in summer are a moodboard in motion—constantly adjusting, refining, copying, iterating. And if natural wine is going to survive out here, it can’t just show up barefoot and biodynamic, shouting ‘volatile acidity.’ It has to be patient. Strategic. It has to come back tomorrow, and the next day, and the one after that.
And that gets tiring. Especially this time of year.
By July 4th, everyone’s on edge. The traffic is insane. Everyone’s overstimulated and underslept, trying to pack in too many plans and be seen at too many tables. No one wants to take a risk. They just want what they already know—and they want it fast.
Which is why this work—this quiet, insistent work of expanding the field of what people even think to ask for—can feel a Sisyphean torture ritual. Cheers!
In Other News
It has come to my attention that I share a birthday with the one and only Emily Sundberg, which I can’t help but take as a good omen.
In an unexpected yet somehow inevitable twist, Leandra Medine Cohen is now a winemaker (thanks for this tip, Emily). She’s teamed up with Broc Cellars on a limited-release bottle styled after the mid-2010s Tumblr girl we all were or wanted to be. If you want to know where to find Broc's wines out east—on or off the list—get at me. You already know they pour the Love Rosé at Montauk Project (not joking).
Veronica Veronica is now on view at Hesse Flatow in Amagansett—a razor-sharp group show curated by my friend Andrew Gardner. It features works by Chloe Wise, Caitlin Keogh, Susan Cianciolo, Alex Batkin and others, organized around themes of memory, mirroring, and the slippery, semi-fictional construction of self. Worth the trip, especially if you’re burnt out on beachy minimalism.
PS: Thirst Behavior is free—for now. If you’re enjoying it, consider pledging your support. When the paid tier goes live, you’ll get targeted wine guides, on-the-ground dispatches, and occasional service gossip I probably shouldn’t be sharing. I’ll never sell you something I wouldn’t drink myself.
Got questions? Spotted a bottle worth talking about? Want the off-menu wine list for a place that’s actually doing it right?
Reply to this email. I read everything, and I’m always down to talk.
Heading to amagansett for the first time for all of August (nyc transplant, my dog needed to swim this summer) and this is the content I needed - thank you.
Wow Zionist Barbie “making” wine now for her fake restaurant? Is nothing sacred??