Malibu Bottles | Credit: Courtesy

There’s a long history of people putting weed in wine. You
basically just add a bunch of heated cannabis flowers to fermenting wine, let
it sit for five days, strain out the leaves, then allow the batch to age
another 8 to 12 months. There’s a little more to it than that, but it’s pretty
simple. And totally illegal.

In 2018, when California voters approved recreational marijuana, Rebel Coast Winery became the first in the world to produce weed-infused wine without running afoul of the law, which says you can’t combine booze and THC in the same bottle. The company has vineyards in Sonoma and offices in Los Angeles and partners with a cannabinoid tech company called ebbu to make its magic in the brave new world of marijuana drinkables. “Weed is big in California,” said CEO Josh Lizotte. “So is wine. We thought, let’s marry the two and see what happens.”

Rebel Coast’s batches of sauvignon blanc and rosé
are stripped of alcohol then injected with THC, explained Lizotte, who’s been
in the cannabis and finance sectors for a decade and also happens to hail from
Santa Barbara. But the removal also takes out the wine’s terpenes (actually,
all of its volatile compounds), so natural flavonoids are added back in for the
proper mouthfeel and aroma.

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