Buckfast

[Roland]

Hi to all,

 

            Below is part of a long article from the New York Times.

 

John L. of ...... COATBRIDGE, Scotland asks - What is it about Buckfast Tonic Wine that makes it so alluring to consumers and yet so repulsive to politicians?

 

The New York Times

Buckfast is considered a regional favourite in Coatbridge.

 

Perhaps it is its special caffeine-and-sweet-wine recipe, which allows overly enthusiastic consumers to be tipsy and bouncy at the same time. Perhaps it is its array of snappy nicknames, including "Wreck the Hoose Juice" - hoose being a Scottish pronunciation of house - or its exotic provenance as the product of wine-making Benedictine monks at an abbey in England.

Whatever the cause, Buckfast has emerged as a symbol of Scotland's entrenched drinking problems at a time when it is urgently debating how to address them. "For a large section of the Scottish population, their relationship with alcohol is damaging and harmful - to individuals, families, communities and to Scotland as a nation," the Scottish government said in a recent report.

 

Buckfast does not seem to help. 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).

 

A spokesman for J. Chandler & Company, which distributes the drink, said that Buckfast accounted for less than 1 percent of the alcoholic beverage market in Scotland and was being unfairly singled out. Nor, he said, is winemaking a sign that the monks of Buckfast Abbey have strayed from the teachings of St. Benedict’s, an accusation recently levelled by an Episcopal bishop.

 

"It's always wise to remember that Jesus turned water into wine," the spokesman, Jim Wilson, said in an interview.

 

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.

 

 

[sammy]

;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;Dnot just coatbridge now but all over  ;D ;D ;D

[Guest frank dooman]

gid stuff the old bucky dont knock it till you try it   ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

[sammy]

can remember a long time ago one of the older chaps in our club always put it in the drinkers for his birds on return  ;D ;Dno joke dont know what it done for them as he never really won consistently  ;D ;D ;Dmaybe bigda will remember him  

[Guest frank dooman]

can remember a long time ago one of the older chaps in our club always put it in the drinkers for his birds on return  ;D ;Dno joke dont know what it done for them as he never really won consistently  ;D ;D ;Dmaybe bigda will remember him  

 

bet they were happy to be home ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

[sammy]

 

bet they were happy to be home ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

 

so was he always lying in a corner of loft ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D

[Guest bigda]

can remember a long time ago one of the older chaps in our club always put it in the drinkers for his birds on return  ;D ;Dno joke dont know what it done for them as he never really won consistently  ;D ;D ;Dmaybe bigda will remember him  

 

remember  the Bowery boys  well,  they  where characters,     and  also  Davy with his pram,  had  many a good laugh with davy full of fun