The Wines That Made Us (4): Sanatogen

So what with one thing and another, I've been feeling a bit peaky. You know, colds and flu, the world situation, they get you down. And I thought, Well, I've tried almost everything except prayer, so I might as well have a glass of tonic wine - Sanatogen Original Tonic Wine, to be specfic, £6.25 for 70cl from Tesco. Sanatogen is one of those products whose essential redundancy has never stood between it and market share: it's one of the last of the great Tonic Wines, a drink which may or may not do you any good ('The name Tonic Wine does not imply health giving or medicinal properties' it announces darkly on the label) but which is 15% by volume and has a handy screw top for those really bleak moments.

In its heyday, of course, it was aimed at emotionally depleted British housewives who found themselves having difficulty with the modern world ('...all you have is an empty house. And the same dull round of household tasks...') or the business of child-rearing ('...it wears you out. And your husband wonders what's wrong with you!') or anything, in fact; and who needed a jolt of something to get through the day ('In no time at all you should feel your old self again'). Nowadays, half a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc would do the trick, but fifty years ago, Sanatogen, or Wincarnis, or Buckfast Tonic Wine ('When everything's an effort'), or, even further back in the catacombs of self-medication, Phosferine ('Absolutely fit - Depression Banished'), Vibrona, or Winox ('40% richer than ordinary Tonic Wines in flesh-forming properties'), were the admissible routes to a more balanced worldview. Occasionally, the ads went as far as showing a picture of a doctor, or at least someone you might mistake for a doctor. So you knew you were in good hands.

What next? Feeling increasingly starved of essential get-up-and-go, I take my Sanatogen bottle, pour a decent couple of fingers, take a swig. Basically? Basically, cough mixture without the unctuous syrupy delivery. A horrible, horrible drink, really distressingly ghastly. Fruit Gums and silver polish; old rainwater, dental disclosing tablets, aftershave, granulated sugar; woodstain. I should spike PK's glass with it one day, it's that bad. And I have no way of knowing what's in it - imported grape juice is all the label admits to, but no sense of the mystery ingredients which transform it from a kind of Ribena into a full-blown 15% health drink. And what is its relationship with Sanatogen health tablets, invented by the Bauer company at the start of the Twentieth Century? Accolade Wines it says on the back, but no mention of the tabloid pick-me-up sold as much to men (Edgy Hubby - Your Chemist Understands) as to women, back in the day. It's an enigma.

All right then: in the dark as to what I've just consumed, do I feel any healthier or less depressed after I've made myself retch through a whole glassful? No. I feel queasy and miserable, not least because I now realise that not only can I not drink Sanatogen Tonic Wine on its own terms, I can't even stick it in a casserole or sauce or what have you, not unless the recipe calls for something sugary and emetic, the colour of a bloodshot eye.

Time passes, though (doesn't it always? And so fast, when you get to a certain age) and I can begin to see, in a larger, non-drinkable sense, some kind of justification for its existence: it's a living fossil, a reminder of a time when the British were still worried enough about wine - real wine, this is - to have to disguise it as something else. Not, obviously, that this is wine, but, like Babycham, it has enough of the characteristics of wine to allow it into that conceptual realm. The bottle looks a tiny bit like a bottle of wine, its contents are sort of wine-coloured, it's definitely not tea or coffee, and, best of all, it's got alcohol in it, that sovereign restorative which dulls the pain of existence just long enough for you to feel regret afterwards. In this guise, it conjures up a lost world of suburban evasions and bitter falsehoods, a place where sensual pleasures were borderline pathological, where certain kinds of self-indulgence had to be mediated by, say, the medical profession - a place where cough mixture met desire and everything was forgiven.

It also, given its original bias towards an unhappy female market, talks specifically of the oppressions of post-War women, stuck in an environment of routine and hobbled expectations, unable to self-actualise like their brainless husbands and forced, instead, to hit the bottle and shut up. It's not good. A patronising man doctor chides you gently about your consitutional emotional frailty? Sanatogen; or Wincarnis; or Vibrona: they'll put a stop to all your nonsense. As, indeed, they seem to have put a stop to mine.

CJ