The recipe for the wine was sent to Buckfast in 1897 by the nephew of one of the original French monks. It used a fortified base wine from Spain, to which macerated maté tea, coca leaves and vanilla had been added. The Tonic was sold at the Abbey as medicinal wine, with the directions on the label: "Three small glasses per day"!

By the 1920's, 1400 bottles were sold annually, 500 of them at Buckfast and the others by post. In 1927, however, the local magistrates withdrew the Abbey's licence to sell the wine, and it seemed that the business would go no further.

However, by a stroke of luck, a London wine merchant was visiting the Abbey at about the same time and, in conversation with the then Abbot, Anscar Vonier, it was decided that the monks would continue to make the Tonic, and the distribution and sale would be carried out by a separate marketing company, with the Abbey receiving a percentage from the sales. In order to broaden its appeal, the Tonic was changed slightly from a rather severe patent medicine to a smoother, more mature medicated wine.

Having taken on the marketing of "Buckfast", the wine merchant - J. Chandler & Company - set out on a series of energetic and creative advertising campaigns. Particularly noticeable were the displays in cinema foyers in the 1930's. Outside Errol Flynn's "Robin Hood", for example, could be seen a display of Tonic Wine, and the slogan, "All the Poor Men Blessed Robin Hood - Buckfast Does The Whole World Good." In Hong Kong, it was marketed as "The dew on the grass in the early morning"!

Today, the monks make Buckfast Tonic Wine along the same lines and according to the same basic recipe as was used at the end of the last century. The main difficulty lies in the successful addition of inert substances - the tonic ingredients - to a base wine which is a natural, living entity. The selection of the base wine is thus of extreme importance, and it has at different times come from Spain, Southern France and Australia.