The most celebrated scene in the recent film Sideways — the moment that may have secured it a nomination for best picture in the upcoming Academy Awards — takes the form of a soliloquy.
Asked to explain his deep love for pinot wines, our anxious and despondent hero, played by Paul Giamatti, delivers a monologue that reveals as much about his wounded heart as his connoisseurship. He talks about the “fragile, delicate qualities” of the grape, the “patience and nurturing” required of the growers, and the flavours that will emerge if the right care is taken, which are “haunting and brilliant and subtle and thrilling and ancient”.
Buckfast Tonic Wine has almost none of those qualities. Its flavours are more workmanlike than brilliant, not haunting so much as openly confrontational, not subtle so much as shockingly rude. Without wanting to sound impious, the result is one shrieking purple hell of a drink.
It tastes sweet enough to turn your face inside out, and strong enough to blast the pennies off the eyes of dead Irishmen.
If your taste in wine really does reflect your innermost self, then my soul must be inky, electric, delicious, and stirred in the dark by holy men, because I love Buckfast without shame or equivocation. I have nothing but contempt for those who would brand it a poison.
A succession of enemies have crossed the paths of us Buckie lovers, most recently, the justice minister Cathy Jamieson. Barely more than a fortnight ago, Jamieson launched a campaign to limit the sales of Buckfast in the local off-licences of her Ayrshire constituency, and ideally to ban it altogether.
She’d identified Buckie not just as part of a wider social problem, but as a problem in itself, a demon in a bottle. Strong, sweet, cheap and popular, it was unofficially appointed the serum of choice for Scotland’s young teams of troublemakers, illegal fuel for “antisocial activities” on Friday nights.
Jamieson’s attack was not the first. She follows a long tradition of would-be reformers, including such figures of moral probity as the former Scottish secretary Helen Liddell and the South Lanarkshire provost Alan Dick. But like them she was doomed to fail, forced to back down when the Benedictine monastery that produces the drink consulted legal advice.
In Jamieson’s defence, it is true that the youth of small-town Ayrshire and Lanarkshire now seem to drink and fight like Russian fur-traders at weekends, and that those areas represent the core of the Buckfast market. But the fact — repeated endlessly by Jim Wilson, the marketing director of Buckfast distributors J Chandler & Co — is that this one product “makes up less than 0.5% of alcohol sales in Scotland”. There are even sweeter, stronger and cheaper drinks on the market, and the kids can get hold of them just as easily.
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.”
And while luminous, fruit-flavoured booze-juices such as Bacardi Breezer and Mad Dog 20/20 are marketed and distributed by international drinks giants, Buckfast is bottled by J Chandler & Co at a small plant in Andover, Hampshire, turns a profit of £28m per year, and pumps most of that profit back into charities and youth projects.
And the central fact is that Buckfast is a great drink. Its recipe comes from French monastic traditions imported by the Benedictine monks of Devonshire in the 1890s, who continue to produce it at Buckfast Abbey in much the same way — mixing French mistellas (unfermented grape spirits) in vats with caffeine, vanillin and natural phosphates.
Crucially, it has not been advertised anywhere in the UK since the 1930s, when it appeared on the posters for Errol Flynn’s Adventures of Robin Hood: “All the poor men blessed Robin Hood — Buckfast does the whole world good!” There is no evidence to suggest that either Hood or Flynn were Buckie drinkers, but that iconic image of the character — vigorous and dynamic, one fist on his hip, laughing heartily and fearlessly from the top of a Sherwood oak tree — is a perfect visual representation of my own stance after a few good swigs of the stuff.
If the Sheriff of Nottingham had been a just and competent peace-keeper, of course, the frisky lawlessness of Robin and his men would not have been warranted.
And if current drinking legislation was monitored sensibly by politicians and enforced consistently by all retailers, then the under-age and the antisocial wouldn’t be able to ruin it for those of us with a sincere, responsible and legitimate love of sweet, sweet Buckfast.
The law now prohibits J Chandler & Co from claiming that Buckfast has any medicinal properties, but my own grandmother believed it was still, as originally marketed, a genuine tonic for “good health and lively blood” and I defy anyone to call her a liar (although her endorsement is mitigated by the fact that she recently died of a stroke).
I have been hailed as a hero by friends in the waning hours of house parties for supplying the Buckfast that wakes them up like a kiss from a handsome prince. I have been accused of middle-class dilettantism by a colleague, a foreign correspondent who has seen bodies hung from telephone poles in the Middle East, but who was horrified to see me drinking Buckfast in a way he mistakenly perceived to be ironic. I have shared my appreciation with Wilson himself, a decent and beleaguered businessman who genuinely believes in his product and its capacity to make a positive contribution in communities.
And I have bought a bottle from a monk at Buckfast Abbey, where they live and work under St Benedict’s rules, laid down in 530AD.
“It’s lovely to drink,” said the monk, and I could have thrown my hands up and joined his brotherhood to hear the appeal of this wine phrased with such a simple lack of rhetoric. I sat and drank it in the quiet physic garden of the abbey. It went to my head like a fuzzy hat, and I felt the exact opposite of antisocial, as blessed as Jesus on a moonbeam, unconvinced by the argument that Buckfast makes the world a worse place. But even down there, where it’s not considered either a cause or a part of any problem, I didn’t want to hang around drinking it on a bench for too long. “Idleness,” wrote St Benedict, “is the enemy of the soul.”
