A man goes into a liquor store, points to some cans he sees on the shelf and asks the storekeeper, “What are those?”
The storekeeper replies: “Those are the weed drinks.”
“You mean, like CBD?”
“No, like THC.”
“And you get high from that? It’s legal?”
The storeowner assures him it is entirely legal, so the guy buys some cans and takes them home….
All of which sounds like the start of a joke, only this isn’t a joke; it’s a true story – although, like a joke, it does at least have a punchline: “So the guy takes them home and, ta-da, it was love at first sip.”
The man in question was Dov Friedman, who two years ago walked into a liquor store in Connecticut and saw those cans on the shelves. They looked a little bit different from anything else that was out there.
For the record, THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol, is the main psychoactive component of cannabis, and one of the class of compounds known as cannabinoids. CBD and low-THC products, containing less than 0.3% THC per container, are currently legal or “decriminalized” in around 36 states, including New York as well as Connecticut (with some decisions pending).
Friedman and his wife, Susi Kenna, who live in Lewisboro, started drinking the hemp-derived THC drinks, and introducing their friends to them. “Everybody loved them,” the couple told Westfair’s Westchester County Business Journal, although Friedman said after a while he himself got “a little fatigued” from drinking seltzer (or “social tonics,” as Kenna called them). According to Kenna, the couple felt there was an opportunity “to create something fantastic in the space, like really be pioneers in an evolving industry” — Mariona.
With a successful media career already behind her – most notably as head of global media at the contemporary art gallery David Zwirner and global head of social media for Art Basel – Kenna was “looking to leave that space” after having children.
Friedman’s background was in finance and marketing. Since Covid, he had been working with start-ups and helping them from “ideation to creation” but had also been involved in bringing other CPG (consumer packaged goods) products, mostly consumer electronic products, to market.
The pair had been brainstorming for a while to find a business they could start together as a family and began to educate themselves about THC drinks.
They learned about an association called the Hemp Beverage Alliance, and Friedman attended his first conference under its auspices in 2023.
“We learned about who was the consumer moving over to hemp beverages and understood very quickly that it was white wine drinkers,” he said.
While you cannot legally mix wine and weed, the pair had come across the whole wine-alternative space – “space” being a word Kenna likes to use a lot. They also discovered that more people were drinking less alcohol, which is classified as carcinogenic, although many doctors are skeptical of recreational cannabis as well.
The couple looked at three brands of wine alternatives and did a great many tastings. By this point they knew the type of product they wanted to create but were uncertain of “how to get to that place.”
Pushing forward, they found a formulation company in Edison, New Jersey, that they worked with to develop the liquid itself. After seven months of fine tuning with 100 iterations of the flavors, Mariona – a name Kenna thought up in a riff on “marijuana” – was born.
The pair – Kenna calls them a “wife and husband team” – said they are self-funded with no debt.
And while Friedman said he still drinks the competition, he added – perhaps with a nod to Sinead O’Connor – that “nothing compares to my own drink.”
Mariona, which comes in three flavors, Sunny, Plush and Vivid (to mimic white, red and Rosé,) contains more than 27 natural ingredients, a concoction of juices, teas, extracts and natural flavors “to simulate the experience you have with wine,” he said. “The idea really was to have you replace your wine with something that is a wine alternative but also gives you a little floaty feeling.”
“There’s a nose to it, there’s a mouthfeel to it, you can’t chug it, it sips like a wine, it feels like a wine, you serve it in a wine glass,” added Kenna, adding that Mariona has up to 70% fewer calories than a glass of wine, between 25 and 45 calories per drink, depending on the flavor.
The product is available to order online and in retail stores in a handful of states, those in New Jersey being the closest to our area for now. “So while they sell THC beverages in New York and Connecticut, our product doesn’t fit into the matrix of what’s currently allowed,” Friedman said.
However, even with the hope that regulations may soon change to permit Mariona’s sale locally, all is not rosy – or shall we say Rosé? – in the hemp garden. In mid-November, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) inserted an amendment into Congress’ federal spending bill aimed at closing what he calls the “hemp loophole.” This provision would effectively ban most hemp‑derived, intoxicating products that currently rely on the existing regulatory definition, which is to say gummies, vapes and beverages.
But having come this far, Kenna and Friedman intend to press on.
“There’s a reason more people haven’t done this (produce an upscale THC beverage),” Friedman said, “because it’s a hard, long and arduous process.”
