BLAME IT ON THE BUCKY: Buckfast Tonic Wine
A Sweet, Strong, and Peculiar Potion - Part 1
‘Tonic wine’ has a puzzlingly long history in Britain. Essentially it is potent, complex and occasionally (but not always) fortified red wine. Usually made at a strength of 15% ABV or higher, making it stronger than most table wines, tonic wine is invariably formulated from wine concentrate or even grape juice. The embryonic wine then has a variety of vitamins, fruits or minerals added – whatever the specific recipe dictates. And there’s always a good deal of added sugar. But tonic wine’s historic selling proposition was always that it provided wide-ranging if rather vaguely-defined health benefits. While this claim inevitably turned out to be largely spurious, and is one which cannot legally be made today, the aura of promoting health and wellbeing is still one which lingers about today’s tonic wine brands.
The fad for tonic wine developed in the late nineteenth century, when it was promoted first and foremost as a medicinal aid. It was, effectively, the descendant of all those catch-all elixirs of previous centuries that were said to have cured everything from colds to cholera. Sometimes there was a genuine medical benefit or effect. The addition of hedgerow fruits to some brands, for example, introduced a rigorous antioxidant into the mix which could help treat cardiovascular diseases, while in the 1860s a product called Vin Mariani was developed in Corsica which, it was claimed, could ‘restore health, energy and vitality’ through its magic ingredient: steeped coca leaves in wine in order to extract their cocaine content.
The overnight success of Angelo Mariani’s cocaine-fuelled Vin Mariani ‘restorative’ encouraged other global manufacturers to concoct their own, highly lucrative ‘tonic wines.’ Sanatogen was invented by the Bauer corporation in Germany in 1898 as a ‘brain tonic’; in Britain after the Second World War it was added to wine concentrate (or rather ‘Ruby British Wine’) to create a tonic wine which is still the market leader in the UK today. (There’s also a variant ‘with added iron.’) During the 1950s, Sanatogen Tonic Wine was controversially claimed to have been ‘endorsed by over 20,000 Physicians,’ a boast which seemed to have little basis in truth and which seems incredible today. Currently, though, the Sanatogen wine label dispassionately notes that 'The name Tonic Wine does not imply health giving or medicinal properties.'
Tonic wines had their first British heyday in the 1950s and 60s, when they were primarily targeted at tired and disconsolate British working-class housewives. (‘And your husband wonders what's wrong with you!') Advertisements for Sanatogen suggested that ‘a glass or two’ would make you feel better when engaged in tiring, repetitious housework while your husband was out at work all day ('In no time at all you should feel your old self again'), while a 1960s ad for Buckfast promised to help lonely and exhausted housewives cope with 'life's little ups and downs.' The British tonic wine Wincarnis 1, first devised in 1881 by William Coleman of Norwich as a drink fortified with the magic ingredient of meat (its name derived from wine carnis, from the Latin for meat) and originally branded, somewhat less enticingly, as Coleman's Liebig's Extract of Meat and Malt Wine, was particularly keen to stress its medicinal qualities. The late Victorian labels on Coleman’s wine stated, in the same vein as Sanatogen, that the product had been ‘recommended by 10,000 medical men [sic]’ – when, in truth, the ‘recommendations’ of these ‘10,000 medical men’ were actually the return coupons sent from doctors requesting their promised free samples.
Other health associations were promoted in a more insidious manner. As historian Thora Hands observes, Wincarnis could allegedly ‘not only treat winter illnesses but could also be used to prevent them [while] the medicinal qualities of Wincarnis were further supported by claims that it was used in nursing homes, hospitals and by the royal Army Medical Corps.’2 Hands notes one particular 1890s print advertisement for Wincarnis, in which a man is pictured sitting working at his desk while a woman (presumably his wife) brings him a glass of Wincarnis ‘by doctor’s orders.’ The caption claimed that: ‘a man who spends his energies recklessly will quickly overdraw his account at the Bank of Health. A man as he manages himself may die old at thirty or young at eighty; brain fag is the foster parent of disease.’ In other words, overwork meant an early demise for professional middle-class men and an early widowhood for their wives, unless it was kept in check by a glass or two of Wincarnis.
Until the creation of the UK’s National Health Service in 1948, tonic wine was an easy solution for people who could not afford (or simply did not want) to see a doctor, for real or imagined conditions. Self-medicating at home with tonic wine instead was both cheaper and easier. As such, tonic wine was very much directed at working-class audiences who could not afford complex healthcare or were simply not in the habit of consulting doctors. (Harold Wilson, the Labour Prime Minister from 1964 to 1970, was dubbed ‘Wincarnis man’ by his critics on account of his humble background and commonplace tastes.)
Tonic wine’s promotion of alleged health benefits was intended to mask the strength of the drink. Indeed, rarely was alcoholic nature of such products mentioned at all in their marketing – even though Wincarnis, a typical example, came in at 17% ABV, the strength of a sherry. Thora Hands, again:
It is hardly surprising that the drink trade capitalised on this and marketed products accordingly. As a tonic, alcohol could be drunk moderately and respectably to alleviate a myriad of psychological and physiological problems. This was an attractive idea – particularly for certain groups of consumers who could not otherwise drink without incurring social and moral disapproval.
Even in today’s supposedly more informed society, tonic wine sales are booming. Currently the tonic wine market is growing at just over 6% a year and sales are expected to reach 3.4 billion US dollars globally by 2032. The product is particularly popular in the Caribbean, where it is alleged to have aphrodisiac and energy properties. Famous traditional brands there include such graphically-branded as Magnum, Babba Roots, Ragga and even Rude Boy. Wincarnis sells well in the West Indies, too – particularly in Jamaica, where it is often mixed with stout or milk. Wincarnis even sell a ginger wine version.
There is one British tonic wine, though, that carries a special social resonance, at least for UK consumers. And it is a brand owned and promoted not by an established distiller, nor a big drink combine, but by Benedictine monks.
Buckfast Abbey was founded as a Benedictine religious house by one Aethelweard of Devon in 1018. After 1134 the abbey was rebuilt as what eventually became a Cistercian institution – the white-cowled Cistercians being a more austere offshoot of the black- cowled Benedictines. Like all British abbeys, Buckfast was forced to submit to dissolution and dismemberment by the Crown during the English Reformation – a shameful episode in British history which remains the nation’s most notorious instance of self-imposed cultural vandalism. On 25 February 1539 Buckfast Abbey was formally surrendered to Henry VIII’s agent and forcibly ‘dissolved.’ The monks were dismissed (though by 1539 there were only ten left: the institution had been declining for years), the abbot was pensioned off, and the abbey’s one and a half tons of gold and silver was transported to the Tower of London ‘for safekeeping.’ The site’s new proprietor, the well-connected local landowner Sir Thomas Denys, stripped the abbey buildings for stone and other useful building materials and ‘reduced them to ruins.’ What structures that remained were razed by a local mill owner in 1800 to make way for a Tudor-style mansion and a wool mill.
In 1882 a subsequent owner of the abbey site, Dr James Gale, decided to sell the property once more. Gale was a local celebrity: a blind inventor who had devised a safe manner for storing gunpowder, had founded the South Devon and Cornwall Institution for the Instruction and Employment of the Blind, and who had been chosen as the subject of a hagiographical biography as early as 1868. Gale was also a Catholic; as such, he was keen to offer the old abbey site to a Catholic religious community. (The time was right: British Roman Catholics had seen their civil rights fully restored in 1829 while in 1850 a Catholic diocesan regime had been re-established across the country.) To that end, Gale placed an advertisement in the Catholic review The Tablet, citing the abbey site as ‘a grand acquisition could it be restored to its original purpose.’ Within six weeks, a group of French Benedictine monks who had been ejected from their own, suppressed French abbey had bought the property at a knock-down price and were soon living on site.
Buckfast was formally reinstated as the Abbey of St Mary in 1902, though its new church was not completed until 1938.3 The church’s architect was a Catholic, too: ecclesiastical specialist Frederick Walters, who had studied as a pupil under the Catholic church architect George Goldie, who in turn had been a close friend of the celebrated British Gothic pioneer A W N Pugin. Walters’s design was ambitious: essentially a variant of the magnificent Anglican cathedral at Worcester, it was clothed not in Worcester’s Gothic fenestration but instead in the round-arched Romanesque idiom of the twelfth century - although provided with a noble central tower phrased in a transitional gothic style.
The new monks farmed and kept bees. From 1897 they also launched a tonic wine, using a recipe their French founders had brought with them, and which they were soon promoting with the slogan ‘Three small glasses a day, for good health and lively blood.’ The wine was only sold locally, though, and while it proved a rewarding line for the abbey, the income it generated was hardly transformative.
So far, a charming tale of monks and their local tipple, wouldn't you agree? But the story takes a sharp turn, a pivotal moment that would alter the destiny of Buckfast's brew forever. Mark your calendars for our next instalment, where we'll explore the fateful year of 1927 – the year everything changed.
From Steven's forthcoming book, "ANOTHER ROUND: A Post-War History of Britain… in Twelve Drinks", to be published this September.
Today owned by the venerable Scottish distillers Ian Macleod, responsible for famous Scotch malts such as Glengoyne, Rosebank and Tamdhu, but still made in Norfolk, at Cawston.
Even today the wine claims that it contains ‘a unique infusion of selected therapeutic herbs and spices… traditionally recognised for their ability to combat common ailments and alleviate their symptoms… and can have beneficial effects on the circulation system and blood pressure.’
In 1968 the Blessed Sacrament Chapel at the east end was completed, designed by Peter Pearn and dominated by a vast, mosaic-glass east window by one of Buckfast’s monks, stained glass artist Charles Norris.