The waiter looked confused, so I repeated, “What does marijuana-infused wine go best with?”
He shrugged his shoulders and suggested I try something by the glass. I guess he hadn’t read the recent Gourmet Live article calling marijuana an “haute herb” and describing how popular it’s become among winemakers.
Edibles chefs are known for making anything from gooey baked goods to savory lasagna using medical marijuana, but not many edibles chefs know how to make a good wine.
“It’s like when we used to try and graft hops and marijuana together, in the 60’s,” laughs my dining companion, Mara, a family friend with an array of stories from her days on Haight-Ashbury. “It never worked but it was always worth a try!”
This time around, a group of mysterious winemakers in California’s wine country (which is conveniently located next to California’s marijuana country) decided to blend the two pastimes into one ingenious concoction.
Many fruits and edible plants can be turned into alcoholic beverages or used as wine bases. Though purist wine makers would scoff, ingredients such as dandelions and stinging nettle have been used to make artisan wines and infusions for decades. With cannabis wine, the process is made better because THC is alcohol soluble. It’s actually a decent idea to let the THC ferment in wine.
In the Gourmet piece, Harry, the masked winemaker, mentions whole-cluster vinification—a process in which the entire grape plant is utilized. With marijuana cannabis wine, the entire plant is used too, stems and all. The article describes Henry’s “subtle-handed” method of marijuana winemaking:
Adjusted for volume, ‘special’ wines can range from under a pound of marijuana per 59-gallon barrel to over 4 pounds per barrel. The result is a spectrum ranging from a gentle, almost absinthe-like effect to something verging on oenological anesthetic. Henry views his wine as a digestif, ‘like a fernet.’ Recently he made a Riesling (unusual, in that most pot-infused wines are reds), mixing about an ounce of fairly dry (as opposed to fresh) marijuana (‘I wanted less of a piney-oily texture’) with the wine in a 5-gallon carboy. After about five months, he bottled the wine, unfiltered, in 375-milliliter splits marked only with a hand-drawn skull and crossbones on the cap.
Alas, these special wines are not to be bought in wine shops or on winery tours of Sonoma County. The hidden bottles are for VIP tastings only. Perhaps it’s a security issue; after all, if one is making cannabis wine and holds a winery license, they stand to lose it all.
What's even more interesting with marijuana wine is the hush-hush approach of the tastings and the high brow fine wine association. For some connoisseurs and gourmands, marijuana-wine for the select few helps rebrand the crop from dope to “haute herb,” giving it a new life in certain circles.