Wine: Eberbach-Schäfer Lemberger

They say that if you've never drunk wine before, you prefer the taste of sweet wine. The more you drink after that, the more you acquire a taste for dry wines. I can verify this from my own experience. The first wine I ever drank was a sweet Chinese wine. I liked it at the time. When I was studying in Berlin I gained a taste for the medium dry white wines grown in central Germany. Then I moved to Stuttgart, where I slowly but surely fell in love with the dry Württemberg wines. For a while I preferred white wines, but I progressed steadily through the red wines, the Black Riesling and the Trollinger. For a long time I didn't like Lemberger wines, because they were too dry for me. Now it's become one of my favourite wines. The wine's dryness emphasises the fruity flavour that would be lost in a sweet wine.

The spicy bouquet has an aroma of blackberries, currants, cherries, pepper, nutmeg, herbs and lilac. Fleshy on the palate, dense, spicy, velvety, fine-meshed tannins, very nice fruit, it shows finesse and elegance and has a long after-taste.

That description by the so-called experts sounded familiar, so I checked. It's exactly the same text that they wrote to describe the Eberbach-Schäfer Trollinger-Lemberger. I'll have to compare the two wines to see if they're really that similar. I think not. Today I compared it with the Eberbach-Schäfer Trollinger. The two wines are the opposite of one another. The Trollinger has an initial dry taste with a fruity after-taste. The Lemberger has a strong fruity taste while drinking, and it settles into a neutral after-taste.