Italians go pop over Brit fizz

Lambrusco: It's a word to strike fear into even the most hardened drinker's heart. At even the most booze-strapped student parties, the distinctive gold screw-topped bottles would be abandoned and that hard-to-forget taste of syrup would loiter on the palate long after the last sip had been winced down.

Perhaps it is because these are the typical impressions of Lambrusco that the manufacturers of Lambrini are insisting they have no wish whatsoever to be associated with the Italian wine.

In some respects, however, it seems the concerns of the Consortium for the Historic Mark of Lambrusco, which is suing Halewood International, the Liverpool-based maker of Lambrini, are justified. In Tesco, one of Lambrini's major stockists, we found Lambrini (£1:49 a bottle, 7.5 per cent alcohol) next to Lambrusco (£1:99 a bottle, 5.5 per cent). A sales manager explained that although Lambrini was, strictly speaking, "a pear cider", the store had put it alongside the Italian wine as "a business decision" because of the "Italian name" and since then it had sold, "very well, much better than before".

To test the two products, and discover if Lambrini really is an imitation of Lambrusco, we took them to the Caf? Rouge restaurant in Kensington together with a tasting panel.

First to try the two drinks was 33-year-old designer Sarah Pearson. She said: "Lambrusco reminds me of something you would take to a Seventies dinner party to accompany the chicken kievs and prawn cocktails.

"The Lambrini does not taste of pears at all, which I found disappointing. Neither of them taste very good, but they are similar. They both taste much too sugary." Next to offer an opinion on the drinks was Karen Philip, 28, manager of the restaurant.

She said: "They are both okay but I think the Lambrusco is better. It tastes more like fizzy grape juice, whereas the other one has that fermented, rotten taste.

"If they were very cold and there was nothing else to drink, I would drink the Lambrini. But I think both of them would give you a really bad hangover."

Daniel Reynolds, 23, a barman, was the odd man out. He said: "I like both of them, and they both taste roughly the same. I think they are both quite delicious, and certainly much better than a nasty bottle of wine."

The overall experience of tasting Lambrusco was, I found, a distinctly unsettling experience. Let's start, as all good wine buffs do, with the colour.