It's called “Wreck the Hoose Juice” — hoose being a Scottish pronunciation of house. Buckfast Wine Tonic is the product of wine-making Benedictine monks at an abbey in England and being blamed for a bevy of social ills in Scotland. The drink is 15 percent alcohol by volume, a bit stronger than most wines. Also, each 750 milliliter bottle contains as much caffeine as eight cans of Coke. In a survey last year of 172 prisoners at a young offenders’ institution, 43 percent of the 117 people who drank alcohol before committing their crimes said they had drunk Buckfast. In a study of litter in a typical housing project, 35 percent of the items identified were Buckfast bottles. And the police in the depressed industrial district of Strathclyde recently told a BBC program that the drink had been mentioned in 5,638 crime reports between 2006 and 2009 (the bottle was used as a weapon in 114 of them).
Britain as a whole has finally accepted that it has a drinking problem that goes beyond fears about binge drinking. It is also realizing that the measure enacted in 2005 to address it — allowing pubs to remain open 24 hours a day, to avoid the last-minute rush — has failed. But if the problem is grave in England, it is worse in Scotland. On average, Scots age 16 and older drank the equivalent of 12.5 quarts of pure alcohol each in 2007, the eighth highest rate in the world (In England, the figure was 10.5 quarts per capita). The government estimates that alcohol misuse costs Scotland $3.6 billion annually in health and social problems and loss of productivity.
A spokesman for J. Chandler & Company, which distributes the drink, said that Buckfast was being unfairly singled out. Nor, he said, is wine-making a sign that the monks of Buckfast Abbey have strayed from the teachings of St. Benedict, an accusation recently leveled by an Episcopal bishop.
“It’s always wise to remember that Jesus turned water into wine,” the spokesman, Jim Wilson, said in an interview.
Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/world/europe/04scotland.html?ref=europe
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