Thirst Behavior is a project about wine, taste, and the social performances that form around them, the rituals of enjoyment shaped by status, media, money, and desire. Wine is the entry point; the real subject is how taste gets made, circulated, and contested, especially in New York and the Hamptons, where leisure and tastemaking overlap most visibly.
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The masculine urge to perform mastery in the world of wine is usually easy to spot from across the room. Sometimes it arrives as a man ordering the biggest Napa Cabernet on the list with the pleased finality of someone selecting a watch from his dealer’s case. Sometimes it is a man asking, with a tone of almost erotic discretion, whether there happens to be any old-school Volnay hiding off-list. Sometimes it is a man in a mesh cap requesting “whatever skin-contact thing you’re excited about,” as though the very phrase skin-contact were proof of emotional availability. There are many such men. I have been, at one point or another, at least two of them.
Wine is especially useful for masculine self-invention because it allows one to project authority while pretending merely to have preferences. A cocktail is over too quickly; beer is too blunt an instrument; whiskey still carries too much obvious freight. Wine permits a man to appear sensitive, knowledgeable, worldly, expensive, ironic, democratic, anti-corporate, old world, new world, anti-snob, hyper-snob, or “just curious,” sometimes all in the same glass. It is one of the few consumer categories in which a person can try on an entire moral and aesthetic identity before the appetizer arrives.
Lately, this has produced a small taxonomy of male wine types. David Mastro Scheidt, writing for Case by Case, has given us the Cab Bro and the Pinot Bro. The Cab Bro is not difficult to imagine: he likes power, extract, confidence, clear labels, declarative pleasures – the wine equivalent of a large black SUV. The Pinot Bro is subtler but no less legible. He prefers nuance, fragility, old wood, unnecessary specificity, and a conversational posture that suggests he has suffered on purpose in order to become interesting. Elsewhere, the natural wine version has been under observation for years: the man who wants the cloudy thing, the Jura thing, the skin-contact thing, the bottle whose label looks like it was designed by a drummer who got really into risograph. Each of these figures is ridiculous in his own way, and each is also real enough to sting.
Before we settle in for the easy pleasures of mockery, it is worth noting that “bro” is itself becoming a slightly exhausted instrument. Dan Brooks wrote recently in The Atlantic that the construction has become a lazy way of elevating pet peeves into social diagnosis. This is basically true. The term is often less a meaningful category than a shortcut – a way of saying: here is a guy who likes something too visibly, too confidently, and in a manner I find spiritually irritating.
Still, the stereotype survives because it names something real. What interests me is not whether the Cab Bro or the Natty Bro is annoying – of course he is – but why wine, of all things, so reliably draws men into performances of aesthetic authority.
Wine presents a special problem for masculinity. Traditional masculinity prefers domains where authority can be made obvious: money, power, size, force, winning, knowing in ways that feel indisputable. Wine does not work like that. It is a field of taste – interpretive, full of soft words and unstable judgments. It asks the drinker to distinguish between elegant and dilute, rustic and flawed, mineral and merely severe. It demands attention, sensitivity, memory, self-doubt, and the willingness to say things that sound frankly absurd in other contexts: cherry skin, wet stones, pool toy, white flowers, tension, lift. Aesthetic judgment is one of the few forms of authority that cannot be asserted by force alone, because it is fundamentally subjective. It has to be performed.
Once taste becomes a form of authority, the desire to appear authoritative starts shaping taste itself. You do not simply order what you like; you order what will position you correctly in the social field. This is where Bourdieu is still maddeningly useful. Taste, he argued, is never just personal preference – it is social distinction disguised as instinct. What feels natural has usually been trained, absorbed, inherited, or performed. Wine makes this unusually visible because every bottle arrives wrapped in available meanings: class, region, education, expense, tradition, rebellion, rarity, access. To order wine in public is to place yourself in relation to those meanings – and those meanings are unevenly legible to the perceivers. A display that reads as humble curiosity to one person might appear monumentally pretentious to another.
The Cab Bro solves the problem of aesthetic authority by importing older, sturdier masculine codes into the wine world. His wines are large, expensive, legible, score-friendly. They announce themselves with ripe fruit, firm tannin, and oaky smoothness. They dominate the table. If wine, as a category, risks feminizing the male consumer through its demands for subtlety, the Cab Bro restores equilibrium by choosing wines that still feel like conquest. The bottle says what the man would perhaps prefer not to say outright: I am decisive, I am serious, I know value when I see it, and I would like no further questions.
The Pinot Bro handles the same anxiety differently. He does not reject subtlety; he colonizes it. Authority comes not from obvious power but from calibrated perception. He knows that the wine is not “big”—it is transparent. He knows that red fruit is not enough; one must specify pomegranate, blood orange, autumn leaves, the haunted floorboards of some drafty Burgundian cellar. If the Cab Bro wants the room to see his watch, the Pinot Bro wants the room to notice that he has read Sebald. Different aesthetic strategies, same basic problem: how to appear authoritative in a domain where direct assertions of authority can feel vulgar.
The natural wine version performs a third solution. He does not want to look powerful or even traditionally knowledgeable; he wants to look culturally fluent. Natural wine offered an appealing set of values – freshness, immediacy, conviviality, anti-pretension, skepticism toward hierarchy – and all of these were, inevitably, available for reuse as style. Before long the natural wine guy had developed his own repertoire of authority signals: esoteric producers, low-intervention pieties, ironic anti-luxury luxury, a theatrical refusal of obvious prestige. He may claim not to care about status, which is precisely why he cares so much about possessing the correct low-status object. David Brooks’s “bourgeois bohemian” framework still feels weirdly alive here. The natty male does not flaunt conventional capital; he converts cultural capital into a more flattering moral image of himself.
The temptation now is to declare one of these men worse than the others. The easy version of the essay would make the Cab Bro the villain and the natural wine guy the enlightened alternative, or vice versa depending on one’s preferred irritant. This is exactly the trap. The differences are real but cosmetic. The Cab Bro, the Pinot Bro, and the Natty Bro all use wine the same way: as a medium through which to stabilize the self in public. The man who orders cult Napa is performing. The man who orders old-school Volnay is performing. The man who requests a lightly chilled Trousseau from an importer with excellent graphic design is performing. One of them may be better company. One may have more interesting politics or even better taste. But all three are engaged in the same basic exercise: translating preference into identity, and identity into authority.
Restaurants are uniquely good at staging this drama because they are already theaters of controlled self-presentation. Dining out is not merely consumption; it is public character work. One reveals oneself through confidence, hesitation, appetite, fluency, over-explanation, under-explanation, generosity, fussiness, how one addresses the server, how one pretends not to care. The wine order is one especially compressed scene within this larger performance – it can make someone seem expansive, stingy, provincial, adventurous, controlling, or exhausting in under thirty seconds. It is almost unfair, really, how much psychic material a bottle can be made to carry.
I should say clearly that I am not writing from outside this system. I have spent too many years in dining rooms, too many hours around lists and producers and all the little internal weather systems of hospitality, to pretend otherwise. I know what it is to order a bottle partly because I want it, partly because it fits the moment, and partly because I know what it says about me to the people at the table. I know the small thrill of being understood through taste, and the equal thrill of being slightly misread in an interesting direction. I also know how easy it is to mistake one’s own performance for sincerity, especially when the performance is built from things one genuinely loves. This is what makes wine socially dangerous. It allows authenticity and theater to blur until even the drinker cannot tell where one ends and the other begins.
Maybe that is why men keep getting weird in wine. It asks for vulnerability in disguise – for preference, discrimination, revelation. It invites expertise, but expertise of an unusually unstable and aesthetic sort. For a certain kind of man, this creates a low-level crisis. If he cannot dominate the field directly, he learns to dominate its codes. If he cannot simply be powerful, he becomes tasteful. And if taste feels too soft, too uncertain, he compensates by performing it with just a little too much conviction.
The bottle changes. The performance remains.
What an absolute nightmare.
I tend to agree that "bro" has become an exhausted category, although I acknowledge the impetus to encapsulate behavior and attitude into a single prototype that can be named and othered, or at least evaluated. The Bros here are a convenient shorthand for the insecurity that demands performance of taste rather than its exercise. As Dan Brooks points out in his excellent Atlantic essay, it is a feminism to declare a male type performative rather than authentic, which makes the proposition of "bro" feels socially and culturally defensible.
I'm sympathetic to this form of critique. But it also make me edgy, because it situates us one gender inversion away from "rosé girl" or "chardonnay cougar" or whatever new prototype we could cook up to name, then other, female social actors in the wine space. This quickly starts feeling less like a feminist exercise and more like a sexist one.
Perhaps it is useful to decouple gender from the exercise altogether and consider instead the broader social anxieties that drive behaviors. This, I think, still adheres to the core of your thesis: That wine is a socially destabilizing force when it asks us to make public choices. As it always does.