7 Things You Should Know About St. Agrestis, the Brand Behind the Rapidly Growing Phony Negroni

It’s the same old trope: A trendy start-up in Brooklyn capitalizes on an of-the-moment fad with hopes of making it big before unceremoniously falling flat. But that’s not the story of St. Agrestis.

While the early days of St. Agrestis largely fall in line with that familiar narrative — it was founded in Brooklyn in an appeal to the growing popularity of aperitivo culture before pivoting to target the more prevalent sober-curious movement — the brand has endured.

St. Agrestis was started in 2014 in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Gowanus by New York City-based sommeliers Nicholas Finger and Fairlie McCollough. Three years later, the founders left the business in the hands of Louis Catizone, Matt Catizone, and Steven DeAngelo — the trio who revamped the contemporary amaro brand into the nationwide, non-alcoholic powerhouse it is today. Its most popular product, the Phony Negroni, has recorded rapid growth since hitting the market in 2022. Such stellar performance earned the company VinePair’s Next Wave Award for Rising Drinks Brand of the Year in 2025.

From its start as a spirit-focused brand to its buyout by a major player in the U.S. wine industry, here are seven things to know about St. Agrestis.

St. Agrestis began with a focus on alcoholic products.

St. Agrestis’s inaugural product was a 30-percent-ABV amaro, which Fingers and McCollough crafted after falling in love with the spirit in Northern Italy. A few years and a change in ownership later, it was another trip to Europe that led the Catizones and DeAngelo to pivot the brand toward the non-alcoholic space. While attending the trade fair Bar Convent Berlin in 2019, the trio noticed a growing number of zero-proof drink brands. They then hit the ground running to develop a non-alcoholic Negroni.

As of late April, St. Agrestis’s full-proof ready-to-drink (RTD) Negroni was still available, but no alcoholic option currently remains on the brand’s website. In its Instagram bio, St. Agrestis now labels its products as “Brooklyn-Produced Non-Alcoholic Cocktails.”

From 2023 to 2025, the brand grew in volume by around 165 percent.

In 2023, the brand moved approximately 1 million 6.8-ounce bottles — the equivalent of 22,222 9-liter cases. In 2025, St. Agrestis’s sales skyrocketed to 59,000 cases. In two years, that’s about 165 percent growth.

Its lineup offers a variety of ‘Phonies.’

The Phony Negroni is St. Agrestis’s top-selling product, but its portfolio includes four other “Phonies” as well as a non-alcoholic amaro beverage. Beyond the flagship product, the lineup consists of Phony Mezcal, White, Espresso, and Limone Negronis. There’s also an Amaro Falso — another cheekily named zero-proof beverage meant to mimic the rich, herbaceous flavor profile of a traditional amaro.

St. Agrestis’s Phony Negroni is decidedly not a combination of NA spirits.

A classic Negroni is composed of equal parts Campari, sweet vermouth, and gin, but St. Agrestis didn’t just create alcohol-free versions of each of the three and combine them to make its NA version. Instead, it focused on the core components that comprise a Negroni’s flavor: botanicals. The team handpicked the 33 botanicals in the final mix. From there, it was trial and error to figure out how much of each should end up in the composite liquid to produce the best Negroni imitation.

The next obstacle was texture. Booze has a higher viscosity than non-alcoholic beverages, so sugar was added to boost the zero-proof beverage’s body. Finally, the team decided to make the Phony Negroni effervescent with both carbon dioxide and nitrogen. While the traditional Negroni recipe doesn’t include any bubbles, the group felt the spritzy texture simulated the bitterness that the Campari and gin bring.

The Wine Group acquired the brand this past April.

In late April 2026, The Wine Group (TWG) acquired St. Agrestis for an undisclosed sum. TWG had its eyes on St. Agrestis for some time because of its impressively rapid growth in the zero-proof sector and its on-premises success. The California-based wine supplier plans to keep St. Agrestis’s production at its current facility in Brooklyn for one year and hopes to add bottled spritzes to the brand’s portfolio in the near future.

On-premises accounts make up the majority of St. Agrestis’s sales.

While most non-alcoholic beverage brands find success on retail shelves, St. Agrestis struck gold in on-premises sales. In 2025, transactions at bars and restaurants accounted for 45 percent of the brand’s revenue. From there, retail raked in 30 percent of sales and direct-to-consumer the remaining 25 percent.

St. Agrestis considers its products RTS, not RTD.

Thanks to the rise of brands like High Noon, BeatBox, and BuzzBallz, the term RTD is everywhere in the beverage industry these days. While St. Agrestis’s products are in line with other RTDs — you crack them open and start sipping — the brand prefers to refer to its drinks as ready-to-serve (RTS). On its website, the product descriptions label the items as “ready-to-serve cocktails.” That’s because the Phony Negroni and other St. Agrestis products are designed to be poured into a separate glass, a key component of their massive appeal with on-premises accounts.

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