(LATimes) - The road to California’s first commercially available pot-infused wine begins on a camping trip in Yosemite National Park in 2010. There, Lisa Molyneux, a Santa Cruz dispensary owner and pioneer in marijuana retail, is introduced to the therapeutic properties of an especially good bottling purveyed by Louisa Sawyer Lindquist, owner of Verdad Wines in Santa Maria. For Molyneux, an ebullient cancer survivor who became a grower and founded her shop, Greenway, to aid fellow survivors, that evening at the campfire got demonstrably mellower. By the next day Molyneux and Sawyer Lindquist were already talking about working together.

The result is Canna Vine, a high-end marijuana product that combines organically grown marijuana and biodynamically farmed grapes, made with the care and meticulousness of Opus One. Advocates include Chelsea Handler and Melissa Etheridge — in fact, Etheridge has her own line of wines, called Know Label, also made by Molyneux — and other celebrities have expressed interest in having their own versions. And it comes with a price — anywhere from $120 to $400 a half-bottle— that alone might prove irresistible to other California winemakers.

Pot wine, also known as green wine (described, for legal reasons, as a “tincture”) has probably been around almost as long as there has been pot and wine. In California its modern inception is usually traced to the late ’70s and the winemaking crew at Chalone Vineyard, which is situated in an inland wine region near Pinnacles National Monument, miles from civilization (and the arm of the law). There, growers could cultivate both ingredients and perfect their methodology in relative secrecy. Winemaker Billy Wathen learned his craft there, and when he moved on to Foxen Winery in the Santa Maria Valley he passed his knowledge along to colleagues and friends. In this way, Santa Barbara County became a hotbed for such practices; when asked who among his colleagues has made some version of green wine, Wathen tends to look askance, as if to say, “Who hasn’t?”