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Food // Wine
The age of cannabis rosé is here. Do the weed wines taste like bong water?
Photo of Esther Mobley
Esther Mobley Jan. 2, 2020 Updated: Jan. 2, 2020 9:43 a.m.
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There's a new crop of cannabis-infused ros�s in California.
1of2
There's a new crop of cannabis-infused ros�s in California.Photo: Chronicle
photo illustration / Getty Images
House of Saka's cannabis-infused rose has 5mg THC per 5-ounce glass.
2of2House of Saka's cannabis-infused rose has 5mg THC per 5-ounce
glass.Photo: House of Saka
In California, cannabis entrepreneurs are trying to refute one of the
fundamental laws of chemistry: that oil and water don’t mix.
Coming on the heels of cannabis-infused kombucha, cannabis-infused seltzer
— really, cannabis-infused everything — the latest beverage trend threatens
to take the category to a new extreme: Welcome to the age of cannabis rosé.
In the last few months, three California companies have released
nonalcoholic, cannabis-infused rosés: the women-centric brands House of
Saka and Viv & Oak, and the stoner-friendly Rebel Coast. Each company wants
its infused rosé to be your after-work wind-down drink, your pairing with a
fillet of salmon, your aperitif on the patio.
They promise a more manageable high than an edible and more subtlety than
lighting up. Because all legal cannabis products are required to be
nonalcoholic, these booze-removed rosés capitalize on the growing “sober
curious movement.” Their high hope is that they might bring new drinkers —
and occasions — into the cannabis fold.
“We see Saka at dinner parties, weddings,” says House of Saka CEO Tracey
Mason. “Places where before you might have had to go outside and around the
corner to smoke a joint.”
This is a new, girly, gentrified look for cannabis products. “Rosé is a
trend specific to women with purchasing power,” says Saka’s president,
Cynthia Salarizadeh. The cannabis rosés are explicitly targeting an
affluent, 21- to 65-year-old female demographic, which is already buying
actual rosé wine in droves: According to Impact Databank, U.S. rosé wine
sales reached 18.7 million cases in 2018, up 1.2 million from three years
earlier.
Whereas Saka’s packaging might be described as bachelorette
party-psychedelic, and Viv & Oak has a kind of sexy-housewife vibe
(marketing shots show the bottle surrounded by chocolate-covered
strawberries), Rebel Coast is more brosé: Its label promises “it’ll turn
out better than that time you went to the Fyre Festival.”
Meanwhile, legal cannabis looked on track for $3.1 billion in sales in
California in 2019, three years into legalization. Within this growing
industry, beverages are potentially an untapped goldmine. Alcohol behemoths
AB InBev and Constellation have made major investments in the cannabis
space, to the tune of $50 million and $5 billion, respectively. Saka, Viv &
Oak and Rebel Coast are still small, each producing under 5,000 cases this
year, but infused beverages could represent $375 million in sales by 2022,
according to the firm BDS Analytics.
“The opportunity in cannabis is a big blue ocean,” says Macai Polansky,
co-founder of Spacestation, a new Sacramento company that bottles
cannabis-infused beverages for other businesses, as well as produces its
own brand of cannabis-infused seltzers called Nectr. “Packaged beverage
makes up 30 to 60% of sales in grocery stores, but right now it’s only
about 1% of a dispensary’s sales.”
But cannabis and wine (or seltzer, or kombucha) might not be such easy
bedfellows. For one thing, dispensaries might not want to deal with the
hassle of bottled beverages. “A pallet of vape cartridges could be worth
$500,000, whereas a pallet of beverages might be worth $20,000 to $30,000,”
Polansky says. Refrigerated storage and transportation are essential for
beverages, but most retail and distribution channels aren’t yet set up for
it.
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The greater challenge, though, is the infusion itself. Cannabis oil needs
to be made water soluble in order to be added to a beverage, as anyone
who’s ever witnessed the separation of oil and vinegar in a jar knows well.
It took Rebel Coast more than a year to figure out a successful infusion
mechanism, says CEO Josh Lizotte. Eventually, Rebel Coast — which first
released an infused Sauvignon Blanc in 2017 — licensed the infusion
technology of a Colorado company, Ebbu. “It goes in clear, masks the flavor
of cannabis” and doesn’t separate, Lizotte says. Saka and Viv & Oak
partnered with an Oakland company, Vertosa, for a similar technology.
Many would-be drinkers might be wary of the edible effect: You eat a pot
gummy, nothing happens, you eat some more, and then an hour later you’re so
high you feel like you might be having a panic attack. That phenomenon “is
the equivalent of walking into a bar and drinking Everclear,” says Jake
Bullock, co-founder of the “social tonic” brand Cann, whose 237ml cans in
flavors like blood orange cardamom contain 2mg THC and 4mg CBD —
considerably less than the 5 to 10mg THC per serving of the cannabis rosés.
The gentle buzz that comes from a couple glasses of wine has, so far, been
hard to find in cannabis edibles.
But the infused rosés promise sessionable experiences. The onset of the
high should come about 15 minutes after consumption, the companies claim,
as opposed to an hour or longer, in part due to the fact that the
bloodstream absorbs liquids more quickly than solid foods. “There’s a peak
high at 45 minutes, and then, just like alcohol, there’s a rapid offset,”
Lizotte says. The high from Rebel Coast’s sativa-heavy Sauvignon Blanc is
meant to be euphoric, but the rosé has a higher percentage of relaxing
indica.
Wary of being grouped in with substandard-tasting weed products,
Salarizadeh and Mason (a 25-year wine industry veteran) emphasize Saka’s
impeccable provenance. They begin with Napa Valley Pinot Noir grapes, which
they make into a regular, old-fashioned rosé.
After the finished wine has aged in tank for a few months, they transport
it over to BevZero, a Santa Rosa facility that removes the alcohol by a
process known as vacuum distillation. That alcohol-free wine can then be
sent to Sacramento, where they have Spacestation infuse and bottle the
beverage. (Legally, you can’t call it wine, so Saka just sticks with
“rosé.”)
But to remove alcohol from a wine isn’t just to remove the booze. It also
removes weight, flavor and the perception of sweetness. The risk is that
you’d be left with thin, bland-tasting acid water. Before the vacuum
distillation, BevZero removes a small portion of the wine, which it adds
back in at the end along with other flavorings — like grapefruit or
strawberry — to try to approximate the flavor of a real, alcoholic rosé.
(The finished product must legally be below 0.5% alcohol by volume, which
is how they get away with adding some of the original wine at the end.)
The three cannabis-infused rosés from California companies are House of
Saka (left), Viv & Oak and Rebel Coast. The beverages contain both THC
and CBD and are nonalcoholic.
The three cannabis-infused rosés from California companies are House of
Saka (left), Viv & Oak and Rebel Coast. The beverages contain both THC and
CBD and are nonalcoholic.
Photo: Viv & Oak
“It starts as wine, but we’re not trying to keep up with that,” says Viv &
Oak founder Alana Burstein, acknowledging that her sparkling cannabis rosé
has not been to the taste of some wine connoisseurs. But the advantage,
unlike for high-end wine, is that with the flavorings, her product is
endlessly malleable. “Everything can be tweaked and changed and modified.
It’s just going to keep on getting better.”
Should the wine industry — and especially the rosé industry — be worried?
Saka’s Mason thinks so. “When you think about how many dollars people are
willing to allocate to having a good time, these beverages will certainly
put a dent in that,” she says. “It’s no-alcohol, no hangover.”
They’re all leaning into the low-calorie angle. Saka claims to have 16
calories per 5-ounce glass; Viv & Oak says it has 24, Rebel Coast 49. (Your
average glass of dry table wine clocks in at around 125 calories.)
OK, but do they taste like bong water? No — though they don’t much taste
like wine, either. The nose on the Saka is a dead ringer for strawberry
Laffy Taffy, the palate reminiscent of Sweet Tarts. It’s candied-tasting,
but there’s enough sourness to keep it from cloying. Viv & Oak is
carbonated, which was a genius move; the bubbles help make up for some of
the texture lost in the alcohol removal. It’s ultra-cloudy, the color of
worn ballet slippers, and tastes like a melted cherry Popsicle, with just
the slightest suggestion of a fresh cannabis aroma on the nose — like a
subtle, winking warning.
Of the three, Rebel Coast’s rosé is the dankest — the one that tastes the
most like weed. It’s clear, unlike the other two hazy prototypes, and still
has many of those strawberry- and cherry-candy notes, but its sweet flavors
mingle with bitter herbs. I found it hard to throw back.
I also found that the rapid-offset claim not to be true, at least for me.
Rapid onset, sure: Within about 20 minutes of drinking a single serving of
each of the infused rosés, my high set in. Ten mg THC, which is how much a
5-ounce serving of Rebel Coast and Viv & Oak contain, is a lot for me; two
glasses and my high would have gone in the wrong direction. Saka, half as
potent at 5 mg per 5 ounces, felt more manageable. In every case, the high
stayed with me for hours. It was pleasant, infinitely more endurable than
what 10 mg of THC has felt to me when I’ve consumed it in the form of a
gummy.
For me, a wine lover, these infused rosés could never compete with the real
deal at the dinner table. I find wine way too delicious to consider these
candied-tasting concoctions as substitutes. Still, I was surprised by how
palatable they were. There are far more disagreeable vehicles to
intoxication.
If you’re a one-glass-and-done type of wine drinker, you might not miss the
feeling of lingering over the dinner table long after your plate is empty,
sipping on glasses of wine leisurely without wondering exactly how many
milligrams of drugs you’ve consumed. I would, but I guess it all comes down
to what you want to get out of your glass.
Esther Mobley is The San Francisco Chronicle’s wine critic. Email:
emobley(a)sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Esther_mobley Instagram: @esthermob
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Wine critic Esther Mobley joined The Chronicle in 2015 to cover California
wine, beer and spirits. Previously she was an assistant editor at Wine
Spectator magazine in New York, and has worked harvests at wineries in Napa
Valley and Argentina. She studied English literature at Smith College.
Past Articles from this Author:
Monk’s Kettle team to open massive, family-friendly beer bar in Marin
The U.S. is threatening European wineries with new tariffs. But Bay
Area businesses would suffer
Looking through the wine glass at 2020
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