True, and grapes are 2.99 a pound at the local grocery store. Doesn't seem to explain why a good dinner table wine can be upwards of $100 a bottle.
Never underestimate the power of a mind-altering substance, or the price that people are willing to pay for it.
While there is an element of perceived value built into the price of a bottle of wine, much more goes into pricing a bottle of wine than the price of grapes.
Different grape varietals can be more or less easy to grow depending on skin thickness, adaptability to different climates, and disease resistance. The pinot noir grape, a notoriously finicky varietal, really only shines in cooler regions and its thin skin makes it highly susceptible to disease. Other grape varietals, like Chardonnay, are highly adaptable to a number of different regions and soil types.
Once harvested, grapes are typically sorted according to quality. The best grapes are used for the best wines. The excess, low-quality harvest is usually used for blending into massive batches of lower quality wine or grape juice or it's thrown into compost to fertilize the next year's crop.
Once the juice from the grapes is pressed and fermented, the wine, depending on type, will either be aged in oak barrels or steel tanks. American Oak Barrels can range in price from $500-$1000 and French Oak Barrels can be double that. If aged in oak, which is typical of many reds and a few whites, the aging can typically take anywhere from a few months to many years.
Once aged, the winemaker will typically select small samples from different barrels and experiment with different blends to get the optimal blend for balance and aging.
All this being said, here's what I learned from working at a smaller winery in Virginia for a year: As a rule of thumb, most of our wines cost about $5-6 per bottle to produce. In the winery, we would sell at retail between $10-30 depending on the type of wine. We would sell at wholesale to restaurants and stores at $8-12/bottle. Stores would typically mark the bottles up to match what we sold the wine at at retail in the winery. Restaurants on the other hand will typically mark up a wine 3-5x what they purchased the wine at to account for corked wine, uncorking fees, storage costs, and of course to make a profit.
So sure, marketing and perception play a big part establishing a market price for wine. (Thus a huge jump in Pinot sales the year after Sideways came out, and a corresponding drop in Merlot sales). But it's also naive to compare the mass-produced Concord or Niagra grapes you're getting at a grocery store to the bottle of wine you're getting at a restaurant.
As naive as some here assuming that all marijuana would be grown, harvested, processed, packaged, and marketed like bulk oregano?
The process of cultivating, harvesting, trimming, drying and curing medicinal-grade Marijuana is as involved and labor-intensive as any other artisanal process like winemaking or gourmet food preparation. It can't be that everyone still thinks it's essentially Cheech and Chong growing bagseed in their high school dorm room closet.
Take a look at the lengths people will go to find and cultivate world-beating cannabis:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsKOzrymxZE
I can definitely tell you this much: California has had essentially legal cannabis for over a decade now, Amsterdam even longer. Growers and dispensaries/shops operate in clear view of the law and only a few ever see serious legal repercussions.
I can also tell you that properly dried and cured cannabis of an exotic or perceivably powerful or flavorful strain is about $400 per ounce. Regular, serviceable "bulk" weed grown outdoors for commercial trade runs about 75-100 an ounce. THAT market I can see becoming commoditized. The high-end market, maybe a bit, but not nearly to such an extent.
I think you may be making a critical, but easy, economic error, which is considering only one side of the supply/demand dynamic. Yes, demand may be sky high, but that only implies high prices if supply is scarce. Things with sky-high demand and a corresponding sky-high supply are still frequently very, very cheap. And legal MJ's supply would be sky high; as others have pointed out, it's called "weed" for a reason. It is not hard to grow, it is not hard to process, it is not hard to move, it doesn't take specialized equipment beyond what already exists off the shelf. The only two ways for the price to end up even remotely high is for the government to tax the hell out of it, or for a cartel to form. And it's very difficult to see how a cartel could form under those circumstances, too; how would you form a dandelion cartel?
First, it takes ~3 lbs of grapes to make a bottle of wine (and the grapes aren't likely the same as the ones you buy in a store). So that would be ~$9/bottle based on the 2.99/lb you mentioned, which is probably a lot more common than $100/bottle. Trader Joe's wine is what, $3?
Even so, you haven't accounted for the winemaking process, which I imagine is significantly more complicated and time consuming than the marijuana-making process (does it involving anything more than drying the leaves?).
Surely there would be craft/luxury brands that are more expensive, but I think for mass-producers, selling a cheaper (as in not cost prohibitive) product would be significantly more profitable.
Well, if we're to set aside the actual strain-crossing, hybridization of sativa and indica (not to mention with ruderalis for a different flowering and flavor profile), cloning, pulling of males and hermaphrodites, creating plants simply for harvesting feminized seeds guaranteed to yield _foo_ amount of grams per plant or per square foot of space depending on lighting, and on and on... then yes, cannabis is not like wine.
Making high-quality hashish, butane hash oils, tinctures, or other "decoctions" such as icewater extraction, are supplemental processes that require significant labor for the amount produced.
I hear you, though. Winemaking is fancy and there have been shows like "Falcon Crest" that chronicle it with an heir of refinement and love's labor that you don't see from, for example, "Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle". Cannabis will, until fully legalized, always be demonized and caricatured as a rebellious college kids' vice.
It is an extremely significant cash crop in the US, though; and I think it will be even when legalization does come around; much moreso than, say, oregano or sage.
Yes, and by the pound is how bulk MJ is bought and sold at a wholesale level.
> Doesn't seem to explain why a good dinner table wine can be upwards of $100 a bottle.
This has been post-processed, aged, and blended by masters whose work is more art than science. I'm not sure there is a good analogue in MJ world except perhaps hashish or hash oil. Hashish is relatively easy to produce and may be aged. It is certainly refined to a greater potency than bulk MJ.
So it will cost more per weight unit than bulk MJ.