California Winery Replaces Alcohol With Marijuana For A Hangover-Free High

Cannabis-infused wine sounds like the sort of thing that a person would expect to already exist. We already have marijuana-infused Nutella and weed-infused coffee pods, so certainly someone must have come up with marijuana wine. The problem is that it is illegal to add marijuana to alcohol, even where marijuana is legal. Now one award-winning California winery says it has created the first marijuana-infused wine by actually removing the alcohol from the wine so the end product is legal. As a bonus, the wine won't cause hangovers.

Recreational marijuana will become legal in California in January, 2018, and Rebel Coast Winery will be ready for it. The winery is already accepting pre-orders on its new marijuana-infused Sauvignon Blanc, which is the first legal marijuana-infused wine, and which is expected to start shipping as it becomes legal to do so.

Rebel Coast co-founders Chip Forsythe and Alex Howe are not the first people to think of marijuana-infused wine.

"No joke this concept has been passed down from winemaker to winemaker since the pioneers got to California," the company says on its website.

Rebel Coast maintains that wine and weed are a natural pairing, and marijuana grows particularly well in a vineyard setting. Grapes and marijuana do well in the same climates and harvest at the same time, and infusing wine with marijuana is a simple matter of adding the marijuana to the wine for a few days while it is fermenting.

But because marijuana cannot legally be sold with or in wine, they said they were forced to become mad scientists.

A Colorado brewery recently created cannabis-infused beer, but that one has no THC and no psychotropic effects.

If alcohol and marijuana cannot be sold together, Rebel Coast decided that instead of removing the THC, they would remove the alcohol, then add the marijuana to create an alcohol-free wine that was still intoxicating.

The first marijuana-infused wine is a California Sauvignon Blanc that is available for pre-order for $59.99. It smells like marijuana, but does not taste like it. Instead it's a crisp white wine with bright citrus flavors. Each bottle contains 16 mg of THC, which means a glass has around 4 mg of THC. That's not extremely strong, but it's still enough that a person will feel it.

"We set out to mimic the experience you'd find with traditional wine," the website says. "A couple glasses will put most people in a great place."

The wine will be available in California in 2018, and in other states with legal recreational marijuana use in the near future. Rebel Coast says it's also working on cannabis-infused rose and sparkling wine, too. Check out the 101 best wineries in America.