Sonoma Valley cannabis grows in quality as well as quantity

As the last grapes are plucked from the vine and the 2021 wine harvest nears completion, another agricultural crop also ends its harvest in October – but for cannabis, it’s the third or fourth crop in the same year, a situation that has created a bumper supply of the recently legalized intoxicant.

Thanks to the perennial plant’s accelerated growth and flowering patterns, developed from decades of loving and often illegal cultivation, cannabis is well on its way to becoming a reliable crop and solid contributor to Sonoma County’s agricultural economy. In its first few years following legalization, cannabis was not included in the Sonoma County’s Farm Bureau reports as an agricultural crop, only upon the Board of Supervisors 2020 request to incorporate those numbers did the county begin to track.

Those figures aren’t available until next month, but state numbers show that as of Aug. 17 the state’s cannabis excise and cultivation taxes generated $172.3 million and $40.4 million respectively in second-quarter revenue, with sales tax coming in at $120.5 million for the same period.

The City of Sonoma’s revenue from cannabis so far is only $110,000 – from the fees levied on the 10 applicants in the 2020 dispensary selection process. City taxes on sales, distribution, manufacturing and other cannabis business has not yet begun to flow.

Still, the plant is not a large contributor to the agriculture of Sonoma County yet. It does not appear on the list of top 10 farm production crops – headed by wine grapes and including milk, poultry and livestock, vegetables and tree fruits like apples.

It’s not just quantity, though, that’s driving the cannabis business in northern California. Many growers and most area dispensaries emphasize the quality of the product – the character of the high, based on increasingly documented chemical compounds (THC, CBD and their variants) and aromatics (terpenes) – in positioning the product in the marketplace.

It’s a process known as “premiumization,” or emphasizing the quality and distinct properties of a particular strain, grape or hops variety. “The wine industry has done that, the beer industry has done that, it makes sense that the cannabis industry would move in the same direction,” said Michael Coats, a PR professional who represents several cannabis businesses. He is also the president of the Sonoma Valley Cannabis Enthusiasts, a nonprofit advocacy group devoted to ensuring that Sonoma Valley cannabis receives recognition for its distinctive character and quality.

At an Oct. 7 gathering near Glen Ellen, Coats brought together some key players in premium cannabis to discuss not only the year’s harvest but the evolution of premium cannabis, one which tracks closely with the social role the plant has played over the last 50 years. Among them was Mike Benziger, who made his name in the Benziger Family Winery (sold in 2015 to the Wine Group) but has long grown medicinal cannabis among other vegetables and herbs under the Glentucky Family Farms rubric.

“Buying organic plants was our genetics program, whatever was on sale that day,” Benziger said of his early forays into cannabis cultivation. But as he became more invested in biodynamic farming practices, his attention to the scientific basis of quality product grew, and he applied the same sense of “terroir” that permeates winegrape farming.

“At the end of the day, trying to get the cannabis to express the environment it is in, you’ve got something that no one else can do – the fingerprints of the farmer all over it,” he said.

Biodynamically grown flowers from his farm, where he grows only 1,500 square feet of cannabis – about a third of what he could legally grow – are in demand by buyers and consumers at area dispensaries.

Among them: Solful, currently with one dispensary in Sebastopol but another set to open at the first of the year in Santa Rosa’s Montgomery Village area.

“At Solful, we offer two lines of cannabis. Our Solful brand flower line which is all small-batch, premium cannabis and our Daily Green line which is our ‘everyday,’ more affordable line – think ‘table wine,’” said Solful CEO Eli Melrod. He estimated that 80% of flower sales are the Solful line, and only 20% in the affordable category.

Other dispensaries show similar emphasis on high-end cannabis – Erich Pearson, of Sparc (soon to open their third county dispensary inside Sonoma city limits) saw quality as a major factor in a customer’s purchase decision.

“The market for the most part either looks to buy the best, or the least expensive,” he told the Index-Tribune.

The focus on quality brings several aspects: the aroma of the dried flower, which depends on the terpenes that are present – very similar to hops, also a member of the Cannabaceae family of flowering plants. Thus, many of the same aromas that characterize craft beer can be found in craft cannabis: the refreshing aroma of pinene, the citrus bite of limonene, the soothing lavender character of linalool.

It’s not just a high THC percentage that factors into a desirable cannabis product, but increasingly the diverse subcategories of cannabinoids that produce very characteristic results: TCHv, for instance, provides a clear, wide-awake high that also suppresses appetite – leading to its popular slang names as “diet weed” and “Weederall.”

As the public became more familiar with the varieties and demanding of the product, cultivators focused on specialized seeds, cloning practices, light patterns and other practices of production as well as laboratory testing to identify and verify active components of the plant. The pressures of the market also drive production, where now three of four crops can be produced in a given year by “dep” –depriving the plants of light as they near maturity to force flowering.

Ben Blake, of a premium Mendocino farm called Esensia, said, “The foundation is genetics” of their efforts to create premium, effect-specific cannabis. However his partner, Marley Lovell, pointed out that commercial pressures also excluded some varieties altogether — “knobby” varietals won’t work in trimming machines, so they become more expensive to finish, and at some point that expense becomes limiting.

Now the market is dominated by such clones as Lemon Drop and Trainwreck and the various Cookies and Cakes and Chemdawg, whose effects are studied in labs and form a critical piece of cannabis marketing. Even Benziger is hip to the latest clones. His favorite flower this year and last has been Prayer Pupil, a sativa strain with powerful aromas that “grabs you by the nose and pulls you up,” as he described it.

Inevitably, the focus on precise agricultural practices and laboratory testing has led to clones so specific and unique they can be patented: Lemon Crush OG is one, licensed by the U.S. Patent Office to the grower who produced it. It’s not the only one, and there will be more.