Stephen Phelan

A turbulent flight to Bristol, then a train to Totnes along the bottom edge of England, on a track running so close to the coastline that the waves splash up against the carriage windows. After that, a bus ride to Buckfastleigh, down threadlike country roads, past a village called Hunter’s Moon and an inn that began serving in the year 1327. The driver will, like James Brown, “take you to the bridge”.

From there, you can walk the last half-mile. Physically then, it’s a long way from the streets of central Scotland – where Buckfast Tonic Wine is drunk in public and private, by old-timers and underagers, habitually and anti-socially – to the Devonshire abbey where that wine is made in cellars by monks. And spiritually, it’s even further. The monks live by St Benedict’s rules, laid down in 530 AD.

“Let nothing be put before the work of God”, he decreed. So ‘Divine Office’ comes first and last at Buckfast Abbey, in the form of communal prayer, sung out from the choirstalls. The spare hours are devoted to modest industry. “They are truly monks,” wrote Benedict, “when they live by the labour of their hands.”

So they make handicrafts, candles and stained glass at Buckfast. They keep a unique strain of bees, and sell the special honey. And they blend their famous tonic wine according to a slight variation on the old monastic recipe, brought from France in the 1890s. It goes down a little easier than it used to. Buckfast Tonic was sold by mail order as a rough patent medicine – three small glasses a day, for good health and lively blood – until 1927, when a London wine merchant made a deal with Abbot Anscar Vonnier, modifying and marketing it as a comestible, an indelicate delicacy, smackingly sweet and heavily fortified.

Today, the base wine still comes from French and Spanish mistellas (unfermented grape spirit), which is pumped from a tanker into the Abbey vats, where the monks mix in various substances – vanillin, sodium and potassium phosphate, sodium glycerophosphate – then pump it back out again to be bottled in Andover by J Chandler & Co, who export Buckfast Tonic Wine around the world. It’s popular in the West Indies, where it suits the local taste for sweet rum. They like it in Hong Kong, where it was once advertised as “The dew on the grass in the early morning”.

But a large percentage of the bottles don’t get too far beyond East Kilbride. Scotland drinks enough Buckfast to know it, with ambivalent familiarity, as ‘The Buckie’. “Yes,” admits Jim Wilson, marketing director for J Chandler & Co. “As a proportion of how much we sell in England and abroad, a lot does come though to the Scottish market.”

Wilson lives and works in Lanarkshire, at the centre of that market. His press officer Bob Calhoun is based in Rothesay. In any other company, their jobs would involve promoting the brand as actively as possible. But Wilson and Calhoun’s positions have become defensive, requiring them to qualify and mitigate the success of their product within particular demographics. They are cautious and measured in accounting for its popularity.

“It’s a good product,” says Wilson, “a quality product.” But put in the simplest terms, Buckfast is also sweet (“It does appeal to that Scottish tooth,” says Calhoun), strong (“Although 15 per cent ABV is not much stronger than the average table wine,” Wilson points out), and relatively cheap (“It retails at (pounds) 5.20,” says Wilson, “but you can buy really nice wines for even less in the supermarket.”).

From a certain point of view – from across the counter with a fake ID – that’s still an unfortunate compound of three key selling points for the underage drinker: sweet, strong and cheap. There is no actual evidence to suggest that Buckfast is the favourite choice of young Scottish consumers looking for a serum against boredom, some illegal fuel for Friday nights. According to Gillian Bell of Alcohol Focus Scotland, “Most findings show that more boys would rather drink strong ciders and beers, and girls tend to prefer alcopops.” “But Buckfast does seem to be quite a powerful cultural thing,” she admits.

The kind of cultural thing that inspires Young Southside Crumbie, a street gang from the Gorbals, to post pictures on their website of members drinking it from the bottle. Or compels tabloid newspapers to stage similar photographs for themselves, to be run alongside articles about soft-touch local stores that sell booze to teenagers, even when there is no specific reference to Buckfast in the text.

Local constabularies are petitioning for it to be sold in plastic bottles, as if it were the only brand ever broken on the pavement or used in glass attacks. And when the owners of an East Kilbride grocers were recently granted an off-licence on the basis of their civic-minded willingness not to stock Buckfast, South Lanarkshire Provost Alan Dick said he was “happy to accept the measure as a way of helping reduce anti-social behaviour and underage drinking”.

“Our name,” sighs Bob Calhoun, “does seem to fit quite nicely into headlines.” That name has become a shorthand, and the label a badge – Buckfast is casually perceived as the unofficial spirit of small Scottish towns and urban centres, and the unofficial sponsor of the young teams who hang around in them. The “dominant brand in the tonic wine sector” is alone among alcoholic products in being identified not just as an implicit part of a wider social problem, but a problem in itself, a demon in a bottle.

Jim Wilson says it’s been this way for 15 years or so, since one particularly potent tabloid story shrieked that “Monklands is drowning in a sea of Buckfast!”, and reported that 70 per cent of the total output from the Abbey was sold in that one ironically named area of Lanarkshire. “Which was totally inaccurate,” says Wilson. “The real figure is less than seven per cent, and Buckfast makes up less than one half of one per cent of alcohol sales in Scotland.”

He’s a front-line witness – before he took this job, he ran an off- licence in Monklands for 16 years. He circles back around pretty regularly, investigating the negative claims about litter, disorder, and delinquency which tend to single out his product. “Not all those claims are false,” he says, “but they’re usually inflated or misdirected. The rest of the market, particularly the alcopops manufacturers, are quite happy to sit back and let Buckfast take the flak. And it’s easy for local politicians to blame and criticise, and distract from the problems that they should be solving.”

There’s not much that Wilson can do about this, but he still does more than most. Buckfast isn’t marketed towards young drinkers or anyone else. It hasn’t even been advertised, anywhere, since the old days, when it appeared on cinema posters for Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood (“All the poor men blessed Robin Hood – Buckfast does the whole world good!”). Instead, the bulk of the budget and profits go into charitable works, youth projects, donations to good causes. J Chandler & Co recently pledged £100,000 to cancer care at St Andrew’s Hospice in Airdrie.

“People don’t realise,” says Gillian Bell, “that the people at Buckfast are much less irresponsible than most of the other drinks companies.” “This is a company that really does care,” says Wilson, “about the product and about the community.” Any marketing director would say that, but they wouldn’t seem as genuine. I’m particularly pleased to believe him because I love Buckfast Tonic Wine without shame or irony. I think it’s inky and delicious and mildly electrifying. And I like talking about it with a responsible Buckfast drinker from the old school.

Although the law now prohibits alcoholic products from claiming any health-giving properties, Wilson still personally believes it does a body good. “A couple of glasses in the evening go down very well. And I will always take it if I feel a cold coming on, even if I can’t say that on the label. I know a lot of old ladies who swear by it.”

Dr Alan Crozier, of Human Nutrition Department at Glasgow University, isn’t so sure about this: “There is no evidence of the ingredients having any medicinal effects,” he says. “The phosphates are basically just natural salts that already occur in the diet. Nothing magical about them.”

But neither is there any evidence to support claims that Buckfast might alter moods or boost aggressiveness beyond the obvious effects of the alcohol. It would seem to be a matter of faith, or prejudice. So I take that long trip to Buckfast Abbey, if only for a change of perspective, just to try my tonic in its original context.

I get there around dusk, as the tourists are leaving. No monks around either, just me. I walk around the vast church, with its message board full of strangers’ post-it prayers for deliverance from schoolwork, eye conditions and heartbreaks. I sit quietly in the Blessed Sacrament Chapel, a room with stained glass windows for walls. I buy a half bottle of the Buckie from a smiling priest in the Monastic Produce Shop.

“It’s lovely to drink,” he says. And of course it is. Sipping it in the Physic Garden, I feel particularly unconvinced by the lazy, feeble reasoning that says Buckfast Tonic Wine makes the world a worse place. But even here, you obviously don’t want to sit around drinking it on a bench for too long. “Idleness,” wrote St Benedict, “is the enemy of the soul.”