The smell hits first. Like someone shoved a handful of fresh and dried herbs into your face. A bottle from Brito’s Farm in Mazovia, Poland. Not wine. Not kombucha. Not tea. A proxy.
For this Sparks episode, Roza Brito and I tasted two bottles together: her signature batch (number 708 of 770) and a red prototype she’s still tuning. A three-year fermentation journey from six bottles per market stand to a thousand bottles per batch, made entirely from what grows around her family’s farm. Hyssop. Oregano. A root she calls curly dock in English. No extracts. No recipe she repeats year after year.
Who is Roza Brito
Roza didn’t come from the wine world. She studied industrial design and got hooked on fermentation during her degree. “Our faculty taught us the goal is not to design another chair,” she told me. After graduation she worked on fermentation in different industries, while running her own ferments on the side.
Brito’s Farm wasn’t a sudden idea. For three years she sold her drinks every weekend at a local farmers’ market outside Warsaw. Between the eggs, vegetables and flowers. Some customers thought it was wine. Others pushed back on the idea of a drink without alcohol. And a regular group came back every Saturday to talk about their week with Roza before picking up a bottle.
“When I talk with winemakers about why they do this, I feel the same why,” Roza said. “From grape to wine, from herb to proxy. That process of fermentation and transformation lives in the same place in my head.”
What is a proxy: not wine, not kombucha
The category itself is still loose. Roza uses the word “proxy” because it captures the in-between nature of the drink. “Some people call it kombucha. Some call it botanical ferment. I leave it open. My focus is making it better: more layers, longer aftertaste.”
Concretely: it’s a fermented drink built on herbs, sometimes with kombucha cultures, sometimes with kefir, often with blends. Sparkling, dry, herbaceous. Not sweet like the supermarket sparkling teas. Not fruit-driven like a juice. Closer in feel to a complex natural wine that took a detour through the herb garden.
The herb Roza herself is most excited about is hyssop, a Mediterranean culinary herb that’s rarely fermented. “It transforms completely through fermentation. It lifts the herb to a different layer.” That’s the working definition of a proxy in her hands: not imitation, but transformation.
Three years at the farmers’ market as R&D
The scale-up happened in steps. First six bottles for one market. Then sixty. Then a hundred. A year of small batches to learn the fermentation curve. After that, one batch of just over 700 bottles, the current signature, now distributed to Polish restaurants and a single distributor. She’s now working toward batches of a thousand.
“It’s like making soup for four people or for four hundred,” Roza said, and that comparison lands close to what Benoît Gouez of Moët & Chandon told us in episode 35 about scale. Two opposite ends of the same idea: no recipe to copy-paste, but a house style rebuilt every year from what the harvest gives.
Roza’s constraints are deliberate. No tea extracts. No imported fruit purées. Whatever grows in the area around the farm goes in. “Constraints push you toward different solutions. I hate the idea of using mango just because the local shop stocks mango more easily than something local.”
The first bottle: 708 of 770
We pour. The bottle is bright, light gold-green, with a soft mousse. The nose opens with a wave of fresh herbs: oregano, thyme, and that hyssop you can’t quite name but recognise from somewhere. A faint floral layer underneath. No sweetness pushing forward.
In the mouth it’s dry. Drier than I expected. A light tannic grip on the gums. Mineral, herbaceous, with a finish that lingers. No soda vibe. No kombucha vinegar bite. Something between the two, with more body and structure than either.
What’s striking is how complex it feels without being heavy. It’s a drink that asks for food. Not for slamming on a sunny terrace, but for pouring next to a board of sharp cheeses, fermented vegetables, or a spiced soup. Bottle 708 of 770. A batch that won’t return. Roza is already working on the next thing.
The red prototype
The second bottle is a test. Roza opens it carefully: earlier prototypes have been known to launch their own contents. This one stays calm. The liquid is cloudy red, almost like someone put a natural wine through a blender.
In the glass it’s immediately different. Tannins are sharper. There’s a roundness and warmth the first bottle doesn’t have. But, and we both clocked it instantly, the finish drops off a cliff. You swallow and the wine is just gone.
“We’re not there yet,” Roza admits straight away. The red profile is built around curly dock root, a plant that grows roadside everywhere in Poland but rarely makes it into kitchens. That root carries the colour and the base. Layered on top: jalapeño from her parents’ farm, artichoke leaf, and cinnamon for the aftertaste. Two batches later, she thinks she’s solved it. Build, measure, learn: the same loop a proxy maker and a lean startup are running on.
Scale vs soul
The bigger question for Brito’s Farm is how to grow without sliding into what Roza calls “the easier path”: standardised extracts, imported base ingredients, predictable yeasts. That’s what most alcohol-free drinks in the mainstream do, and it’s what would flatten her drink.
Her route through is the same one small winemakers walk: technology as a tool, not a replacement. Sensors to control fermentation, better data to understand what happened in which batch, but ingredients that still come from the land and people still working with their hands. “The same romantic values at higher quantity. That’s what I believe in.”
The maximum scale she sees is bounded by what she and the family farm can produce. That’s not a problem. “My goal is not ‘on every shelf in Poland’. My goal is for a restaurant in Berlin or Amsterdam to be able to pour something new from this region.” Scale comes later. The style has to be right first.
Disruption or addition
I asked whether Roza thinks she’s disrupting the market. Her answer was sharp: no. “If it’s disruption, it’s by accident. My goal is not to push something out. It’s to add something.”
What she does hope for: not being placed in a separate room at wine festivals. Right now, proxies often get physically separated from wine: own space, own table, own audience. But the drink itself belongs at the same dinner table. Next to food, with comparable structure and complexity. Some visitors still flinch when they hear it isn’t wine. Others, especially on the natural wine side, treat it as the obvious next step.
Frequently asked questions
What exactly is a proxy? A proxy is a fermented, non-alcoholic drink built on botanical ingredients: herbs, flowers, roots, sometimes fruit. It sits between kombucha, sparkling tea and natural wine. Roza Brito uses the word because the drink intentionally refuses to fit any one existing category.
How is Brito’s Farm proxy fermented? With live cultures: sometimes kombucha, sometimes kefir, sometimes blends. Most ingredients come from the family farm in Mazovia, Poland, or from the surrounding countryside. No tea extracts. No imported base ingredients where it can be avoided.
Is Brito’s Farm available outside Poland? Not yet. Current distribution runs through Polish restaurants and a single distributor. International expansion is planned for upcoming batches.
What ingredients are in the first bottle? The signature batch leans on hyssop, oregano, thyme, and local wild plants. Roza keeps the exact formula loose because it shifts slightly batch to batch.
The bottle itself
Brito’s Farm signature, bottle 708 of 770. A fermented botanical proxy from the Mazovian region of Poland. Bright light gold, dry, herbaceous, with light tannic grip and a long savoury finish. Pours well next to sharp cheeses, fermented vegetables, or spiced cooking. Small bottling, no fixed retail price outside Poland.
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More about Brito’s Farm
Follow Brito’s Farm on Instagram for new batches, prototypes, and where the bottles are being poured.
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