Imagine a glass of pot and wine – a (magical, almost) potion in which two psychoactive substances have been carefully mixed. It may come across as a new idea, thanks to all the buzz around the legalisation of cannabis, but it has been around for quite some time, say 3700 years.
Historically, wine-and-pot-potions haven’t been guzzled at the average happy hour rate. No one really knows who came up with this (obviously, kickass) idea. The probability of the person coming up with the potion AND sending out a message or a tweet AND the post going viral on the internet is the same as the probability of us looking up in the sky and seeing pigs fly.
Early records from the Han Dynasty in China suggests that this ganja and grape combo was used to knock patients out just before the surgery.
Back in the time, Hua Tuo (140-208), a physician in China, used a general anaesthetic combining wine with a herbal concoction called máfèisàn (or just cannabis-powder-boiling-on-water) on his patients. They would “immediately become intoxicated as though dead and completely insensate.”
Thanks to the discovery of wine and pot, you could, at least, trust to phase out before any hoodwinker could experiment with your, you know, maybe intestines or spinal cord.
Just a side note, but Hua Tao was eventually caught and executed and all his medical notes were lost.
If you were thinking of whipping up your own concoction of wine and pot, you clearly need to think and plan out better. It is not as easy as throwing all the herbs in wine and sipping on it.
Generally, hybrid strains of cannabis are used so as to prevent drinkers from getting too anxious or groggy. The choice of wine is generally Pinot Noirs, Syrahs, Cabernets, Grenaches, Chardonnays or Viogniers.
Pounds of cannabis buds are harvested, dried, cured, and weighed out in advance, so as to greet the grape juice the moment it arrives. It is then allowed to ferment till it turns into that perfect drink you can gulp. Feel like feeling tipsy already?
Wouldn’t take the genius of a person to figure this out, cannabis-infused wine tends to get you high quicker than when both are consumed separately, and the combination of weed and alcohol produces quite a unique (drooooolworthy) high.
Melissa Etheridge, who became a plain-spoken advocate of medical cannabis after going through a bout of chemotherapy, has created her own line of pot-wine called ‘No Label’.
No one knows when it will be made legally available and when it will hit the stores in India, but here’s hoping soon.