Buckfast: the Transformation of Scotland’s Most Controversial Drink

The Food Programme

BBC

Arts, Food

4.4 • 943 Ratings

🗓️ 12 September 2021

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Shedding its associations with street crime and violence, Buckfast is now drunk in upmarket cocktail bars, trendy restaurants and hipster haunts. Jaega Wise visits Glasgow to hear about this transformation, and finds out what a wine produced by monks in Devon can tell us about modern Scotland.

Jaega speaks to a comedian about his complicated history with the drink, enlists help from a criminologist to understand Buckfast’s rebirth, and finds out what the fortified wine tastes like as a pizza and cocktail ingredient with a sceptical chef.

A former police chief inspector explores the legacies of problem drinking, and she hears from the chief executive of an alcohol awareness charity about the dangers of scapegoating a single brand.

She visits a drinks lab experimenting with Buckfast in north London, tracks its evolution, and asks if terms like class appropriation and gentrification apply to this much-maligned bottle of tonic wine.

Presented by Jaega Wise. Produced by Robbie Armstrong.

Transcript

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0:50.0	So we are here in the middle of an industrial estate in North London.
0:54.0	Nesseled way in one of the buildings is a lab, not just any lab, a drinks lab.
1:00.0	And they work with some of the world's best drinks companies working with flavours.
1:05.9	So I want to know how Buckfast has got from being made in the 1890s by monks in Devon
1:12.0	to the controversies of the drinking Glasgow all the way down to this
1:17.0	quite trendy part of North London. I want to see what they're doing with Buckfast.
1:31.0	You're listening to the food program, that place for Hungry Minds, with me Jaga Wise. Made by monks, drunk by drunks? Well, so went the popular street slogan
1:36.5	for this fortified wine, made by the Benedictine order of the Catholic Church in a town
1:41.9	called Buckfasley.
1:43.0	The drink was once known for its spurious health properties, sold in pharmacies,
	...

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