Rambouillet

The Rambouillet is the French Merino, and it has a precise origin: in 1786 Louis XVI obtained around 350 Spanish Merinos and established them at the royal estate at Rambouillet, where the flock was kept closed and selected for over a century.

What came out is a larger, harder sheep than the Spanish original, producing fine wool while still raising a usable lamb. Rambouillet blood underlies most western American range flocks and several of the breeds above.

They are white, large framed, and will breed out of season, which is unusual in a fine-wool breed.

The trade is the wool itself. Fine wool means dense fleece and skin folds in some lines, which means more shearing skill, more attention to fly strike, and a fleece whose value depends heavily on how carefully it was handled at shearing.