half-dry

When you find a bulky black bottle that looks like it holds Black Forest schnapps or some unspeakable cod liver oil in your supermarket, it will almost certainly be a German wine: Black Tower, a brand designed for the UK mass market. Perhaps it makes the Brits think of German Gemütlichkeit of the rustic type.

I was actually after the Black Tower Liebfraumilch, but as I could not find it I went for this Rivaner for £3.88 instead (Rivaner, btw, is another name for the grape variety Müller-Thurgau, if you wondered).

Keen to learn what British women in their twenties want to drink? Get a bottle of Blue Nun. You will also learn that you might not want to spend too many 'Heavenly Nights In' or 'Wicked Nights Out' (to quote the Blue Nun website) drinking with the Blue Nun girls. Well, you might want to, but then it better be not only about the wine.

Nice straw colour.
Smells of ripe green apple, a little grassy.
In the mouth, fresh nice apple fruit, with very noticeable sweetness (bordering on the off- dry category), good freshness, a light body (lighter than the actual 13% would make you expect), nice fresh acidity, a hint of nuttiness and minerality in the background.

Imagine my surprise when I found myself looking at a German Riesling in a supermarket in the outskirts of Alexandria, Virginia. Actually, there were several wines claiming to be 'German' Riesling, but I skipped two that were not bottled in Germany. I also skipped a 'Claret' made by Francis Ford Coppola - yes, THAT Coppola, another celebrity who ventured into wine making -, but as I was drinking 'with' a pregnant woman it seemed best to focus on something light that I could finish by myself, if need be. Still a shame not to have tried the Coppola, but there may be other times.

This is our second wine from the supermarket wine category. After the Liebfraumilch, it only could get better. And it did. At first, I was not really impressed. Drinkable, but not too much in the nose or mouth, apart from a little lemon. With a little bit of air, this wine did improve a lot.

So here we are. The infamous, dreaded Liebfraumilch. One day it had to happen. And that day is now. In the really olden days, Liebfraumilch (beloved Lady's milk) was a label for low yield, high quality wines from the city of Worms (Rheinhessen). It was a highly sought after example of German wine making.

Now it can be put on pretty much any vaguely sweet wine from the Rheinhessen area of Germany that is made from grape varieties such as Riesling or, mostly, Müller-Thurgau. Sweet, cheap (£2.82 in this instance) and not very cheerful, these wines do now represent German wine in the UK - at least for a majority of customers. So it seemed the logical choice to turn to Liebfraumilch for the first wine in what may become a regular Wine Rambler category: supermarket wine.