Everywhere I go in northern California — and I do mean everywhere — I’m hearing about the marijuana-laced red wine that seems to be all the rage. I met a guy at a foodie party in San Francisco last weekend (where, incidentally, they were smoking pot across the patio) who has tried it. He said, somewhat dreamily, “It gives you just a nice, slight buzz.”
Adding the herb to fermenting red wine, I can’t imagine how the THC makes it through the process unscathed. But it makes it through baking, so who knows? I will update this once I query a few winemakers. UPDATE: Spoke with two winemakers — who wouldn’t admit to trying this — the THC effort does endure through the winemaking process but you have to use so much marijuana that it makes the wine taste skunky.
This is an excerpt from an article by the Daily Beast‘s Michael Steinberger about the new weed wine:
Last year, at a Burgundy dinner in New York, I was given a wine that smelled like no Burgundy I’d ever encountered. Instead, it had a pungent herbal aroma that called to mind a college dormitory on a Saturday night—that, or a Grateful Dead concert. The devilish grin on the face of the friend who offered me the mystery liquid confirmed it: what I had in my hand was a glass of pot wine—yes, as in marijuana-laced.
In the spirit of inquiry, I took a sip, and while it neither got me stoned nor made me want to ditch the glass of 1985 Roumier Bonnes-Mares that I was holding in my other hand, it was certainly a novel experience. But it turns out that pot wine isn’t such a novelty in California wine country; there apparently are quite a few winemakers surreptitiously producing cannabis cuvées.
