The recipe for the Tonic wine is attributed to the original French monks who settled at the Abbey in the 1880's. Base wines from Spain, known as mistellas, were imported and to these were added the tonic ingredients according to the old recipe.The Tonic was sold at the Abbey as medicinal wine, with the directions on the label; 3 small glasses per day (dead on!).

By the 1920's 1400 bottles were sold annually, 500 from Buckfast and the remainder by post. In 1927 a London wine merchant was visiting the Abbey, and in conversation with the Abbot, Anscar Vonnier, it was decided that the monks would continue to make the Tonic wine with the distribution and sale to be carried out by a separate marketing company. 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&Co. - 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" (catchy). In Hong Kong, it was marketed as "The Dew On The Grass In The Early Morning"

During the 60's a local Lurgan Doctor began prescribing Buckfast for 'women's problems', on bringing this tonic home it didn't take long for the husbands to realise it's potential (in Lurgan this took approximately 20 mins). Numerous visits to the doctor's surgery followed until the doc caught on, but not before it had gained a strong foothold in the town.

It therefore wasn't long before rumours of its' medicinal properties spread to neighbouring towns and beyond. Buckfast nowadays is drunk anywhere where there is a collection of like minded lunatics, from Liverpool to Govan, and from Cork to Coleraine. The recipe has remained the same since the turn of the century. The main difficulty in producing the wine is the successful addition of inert substances- the ingredients - to a base wine which is a living entity. the selection of the base wine is of extreme importance, and it has at different times come from Spain, France and Australia. This explains the different tastes often said to be due to the different batch numbers of the wine.