The wine made by British monks that’s making bank

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The wine made by British monks that’s making bank

The wine made by British monks that’s making bank

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Katherine Laidlaw

Katherine Laidlaw

Published:

July 01, 2026

No one drinking anymore? Not on their watch

You’ve seen the bottles of health elixirs lining the grocery store. Want to hit a bar on a school night? There’s a mocktail for that. Cans of seltzer and near-beer line grocery store shelves. No one is drinking anymore.

Across the US and North America, alcohol sales are down. Alcohol spending, as a share of overall spend, is at a 40-year low.

Revenues are in freefall: Bloomberg estimates shares of the world’s top alcohol companies have lost ~$830B in the last four years.

One British company, with a wild, checkered past, is bucking the trend. How?

Wreck the hoose juice

Known now to local fans as “wreck the hoose juice,” “commotion lotion,” or just “Bucky,” Buckfast tonic wine had more dignified origins.

Buckfast Abbey, where Buckfast Tonic Wine originated. (Photo by PA Thompson/The Image Bank via Getty Images)

Production began in 1882. Initially sold as a medicine, the tonic was first adapted from a Spanish mistella recipe. A group of Benedictine monks living in the stately Buckfast Abbey on the moors of Devon, England, added a proprietary spice mix, and Buckfast tonic wine was born.

As a side hustle to help fund their charitable works, the monks opened a bottle shop and filled orders that came in by mail.

By 1927, they were selling 1.4k bottles a year.

That same year, the abbott and a group of business partners established a new company, J. Chandler and Co., to handle the wine’s distribution. Demand kept growing.

Advertisements extolled it as a “health restorative of unequalled excellence,” made “from a secret process known only to the monks.” The monks’ reputation, they said, was guarantee of its purity, and it could help with convalescence, depression, anemia, depleted vitality, loss of appetite, and more.

Advertisement from Dublin’s Evening Herald in 1928. (Photo by newspapers.com)

Over the decades, Buckfast’s recipe sweetened and evolved. J. Chandler and Co. distributed the wine through chemists, which added to its medicinal image. In winter, and during reported flu outbreaks, sales went up. By the 1950s, they were advertising it as giving imbibers “a new lease of life” if they were recovering from an illness.

In 1968, new regulations meant companies without any health benefits had to tweak their advertising. “To make you feel better, be better,” one advertisement read.

Monks testing their wares. (Photo by Daily Mirror/Mirrorpix via Getty Images)

By the 1980s, though, the wine had become known for youth binge drinking, a reputation that has since endured for 40 years.

As one writer put it: “Buckfast is syrup-thick, tastes like a palatable mixture of Riberna and Benylin and gets you pretty uniquely trashed.” Its fortified wine recipe clocks in at 15% ABV, and contains more caffeine than eight cans of Coke.

Hooliganism

It’s especially popular in Scotland, to the chagrin of local police in some of the country’s most deprived regions where it’s become linked to crime.

Back in the 90s, one legislator threatened to call the pope if the monks didn’t do something about the social havoc wreaked by the booze, broken bottles lining town streets after wild nights out.

Bottles of Bucky line shelves at supermarkets and off-licences, aka UK liquor stores. (Photo by Danny Lawson/PA Images via Getty Images)

The association ignited a decades-long debate over who was responsible for the hooliganism — the drink-makers or the drinkers themselves.

A BBC report in 2013 offered a startling discovery: an analysis of police reports from Strathclyde, an area in what’s known as the Buckfast Triangle in Scotland, found mention of the brand in 6.5k reports over a three-year period. A couple years later, a Scottish Prison Service survey found that 43% of offenders drank Buckfast before their latest offense.

In 2014, the company introduced cans, instead of its traditional glass bottles, in an effort to cut down on bottle attacks and bodily injuries. According to news reports, the 16k run of cans sold out in its first month.

The next year, legislators proposed a bill to regulate alcoholic drinks with high caffeine content. It was voted down.

The wine market, according to market intelligence firm Mintel’s senior research analyst Alice Baker , is fickle.

“It’s a very fragmented category,” she says. “There’s not much brand loyalty. People are far more driven by a...