IN THE LONG and grim tradition of alcoholic Scottish brawls, this is one of the oddest: the Scottish Health Minister, Andy Kerr, has squared up to the Benedictine monks in Devon who make Buckfast tonic wine, the powerful concoction of red wine and caffeine that has long been favoured by Scottish drinkers as a swift, cheap path to oblivion.

Buckfast, or “Buckie”, holds a particular place in the affections (and wrecked metabolism) of the Scottish drunk. Among hardened drinkers it is known as “What the Hell are you looking at?”, “Wreck the Hoose Juice” and “Coatbridge Table Wine”. For special occasions, a bottle of Buckie may be mashed up with meringue and vanilla ice cream to create a vicious, viscous gloop guaranteed to make the drinker very drunk, very quickly, and then very sick.

The monks of Buckfast Abbey have added a caveat to the label of their special brew — “the name tonic wine does not imply health giving or medicinal properties” — which just goes to show that ironic understatement is alive and well among our monastic orders.

“There’s something different about that drink,” insists Mr Kerr, who has chosen to slug it out with the monks to make a point about excessive Scottish drinking habits. Actually, there is no great difference between Buckfast and any other variety of cheap alcohol. It has been made to a secret French recipe since the 1880s, and it is drunk in Spain, Australia and the Caribbean without its consumers falling over or nutting one another. The difference is that too many Scots do not know how to drink it without getting miroculous, stotious, wellied or any other of the myriad Scots terms we have invented to describe inebriation.

The Buckfast fracas is emblematic of the ingrained, abusive and horribly destructive relationship between my countrymen and the bottle. We Scots make the best drink, and the best drinkers, in the world. No parties in the world can compare, in riotous enjoyment, with Hogmanay and Burns Night. We just don’t know when to stop.

The bill for Scotland’s boozing is truly sobering. Alcohol-related deaths in Scotland have risen by a fifth in the last seven years, and the numbers dying of drink are growing faster than in another European country. Deaths from liver cirrhosis have quadrupled among Scottish men and tripled among women in a single generation. The annual cost of battling this tidal wave of alcohol, in terms of health care, social services and sweeping up the broken bottles of Buckie, stands at a staggering £1.1 billion.

The same amount of money was spent, last year, by the record 2.4 million tourists who visited Scotland. People are pouring into the country as never before. Scotland is increasingly prosperous and a beacon of world culture; yet its inhabitants continue to drown their perceived sorrows in an escalating orgy of suicidal drinking.

Next month the Scottish Executive, encouraged by the effectiveness of the smoking ban, will unveil yet another action plan to combat Scottish alcohol abuse. What is needed, however, is not more regulation, but a more fundamental cultural shift: cutting down on the booze means weaning Scotland off a deeply held self-image.

Scottish humour and culture are soused in alcohol. Billy Connolly has long been sober, but his performance inevitably recalls, mocks and celebrates his legless days. Harry Lauder composed Glasgow’s unofficial anthem as an ode to the city going “round and round” on a Saturday night. John Reid, another reformed drinker, likes to tell a joke about how he found he was “allergic to leather” because he kept waking up with his shoes on and a splitting headache.

The drunken hero is a staple of Scots literature, and drinking has become culturally linked to the idea of liberty. Robert Louis Stevenson stated that “wine is bottled poetry” and Robert Burns himself wrote: “Freedom and whisky gang thegither.” Somehow that sentiment has evolved into the freedom to get miserably blootered and die young.

Burns’s early death at 36 may have been linked to heavy drinking (his biographers are divided), but he also understood the pleasure and liberation that a strong drink can provide on a cold night in a tough country.

“Gie him strong drink until he wink/ That’s sinking in despair/ . . . There let him bowse, and deep carouse/ Wi’ bumpers flowing o’er/ Till he forgets his loves or debts/ An’ minds his griefs no more.”

Scots traditionally drank to forget: endemic poverty, tenement life, the harsh weather. A dram might take the edge off the hard, unforgiving glint of a Calvinist existence. Yet the serious Scottish alcoholism of the 19th century was diluted by changing attitudes rather than laws. Regular heavy drinking simply ceased to be a respectable or interesting activity.

The strange, miserablist tradition of Scottish drinking seems out of kilter with a nation that is increasingly self-confident, a country raking in money from tourists to spend on new livers. Today Scotland is wealthier, better educated and warmer than ever before. All dark, northern countries drink more deeply than those in the lighter south, but now even Scottish weather seems to be improving. As I look outside the window, the rhododendrons are flowering for the third time, in late October.

As a child, I vividly remember the drunks lined up outside the hotel in our local village. Lurching, friendly men with wind-scoured faces, they would lean, patiently if unsteadily, against the wall between afternoon closing time and reopening in the evening regardless of the weather. My father insisted they were propping up the hotel.

Those drunks have long been gathered to the celestial tavern, but a new generation of Scottish drinkers is being pickled, with the freedom to drink all day, and alcohol comparatively cheaper than ever. No one would welcome a return to the pious, bible-bashing temperance of the 19th century, but there are better ways to drink, and surely better ways to tackle the problem than picking a fight with the blameless monks of Buckfast Abbey.

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