Style and flavour
Sweet and full-bodied, with dark dried fruit and a faintly medicinal, bittersweet herbal undertone. The texture is rounded rather than sharp, and a soft vanilla note carries through to the finish, which the producer itself singles out.
Key ingredients
- Red wine based aperitif (99.28%, as declared on the label)
- Caffeine
- Sulphites
Caffeine
The current UK label declares 30 mg of caffeine per 100 ml. That is about 37.5 mg in a 125 ml glass, roughly a third of a cup of instant coffee, and about 225 mg in a 75 cl bottle. Older reports from 2010 quoted a higher 37.5 mg per 100 ml, which is where the often-repeated figure of 281 mg per bottle comes from.
History
The present Buckfast Abbey community dates from 1882, when Benedictine monks who had left France acquired the site in Devon. According to the Abbey, the monks supported themselves partly by making liniments and medicines, and one wine-based preparation became the tonic wine. Both the Abbey and its distributor date the recipe to 1897, when the nephew of a French monk is said to have brought it to Buckfast; the Abbey also credits it more loosely to the founding monks of the 1880s.
By the 1920s, the Abbey says, around 1,400 bottles a year were being sold, about 500 at Buckfast and the remainder by post. Licensing restrictions made it hard for the monks to continue selling it themselves, and a London wine merchant, J. Chandler & Co, proposed handling sales. J. Chandler & Co (Buckfast) Ltd was incorporated in May 1927, and the recipe was adjusted at that time to move it away from a patent-medicine style towards a medicated wine.
The wine is still made at the Abbey from imported base wine. The Abbey says its base mistellas now come from France, having originally been Spanish, and BBC News reported in 2013 that French wine is fortified and blended at Buckfast in a winery opened in 2011. Finished wine travels by tanker to J. Chandler's site in Andover, Hampshire, where bottling has been based since 2000 after decades at Abbey House in Fulham, London.
Culture
Since the mid-2000s Scottish politicians and police have repeatedly linked Buckfast to antisocial behaviour in parts of west-central Scotland, with Strathclyde Police citing 6,496 crime reports mentioning it between 2010 and 2012; the Abbey and J. Chandler reject that framing, and the Abbot told the BBC the wine 'is not made to be abused'. In 2014 Police Scotland apologised to the distributor for asking a shopkeeper to stop selling it and agreed not to attach anti-crime labels to bottles without reasonable grounds.
How to serve
The producer suggests drinking it neat or over ice with a twist of orange peel, or as a long drink with two parts lemonade to one part Buckfast. It also proposes a 'Royale' of one part Buckfast to four parts sparkling wine. For more ideas, see our tonic wine recipes.