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The Food Programme: Buckfast: the Transformation of Scotland’s Most Controversial Drink

Buckfast: the Transformation of Scotland’s Most Controversial Drink

BBC Radio 4 - The Food Programme, Buckfast: the Transformation of Scotland’s Most Controversial Drink

Jaega Wise finds out how a tonic wine with a troubled past became middle class.

Jaega Wise finds out how this complicated drink shed its nefarious reputation to be drunk in upmarket cocktail bars and used as a cooking ingredient.

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.

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