You just might be surprised... and Merino wool gets even softer with a couple washings.

This brings up a silly story I thought I'd share here...

My ex-girlfriend had always maintained that she was allergic to wool - something which I never questioned. Then one day an MD friend of ours heard her comment about this and offered to do tests to determine whether it was the wool or perhaps specific dyes which she was reacting to. --- Well, it turned out that what she had simply meant was not that anything was actually creating a rash or raising hives, but rather that it simply made her itch - a result of the coarseness of the wool which was basically "pricking" her skin. --- Unfortunately for me, she then discovered and became enamoured of Cashmere sweaters (that's actually a goat's wool which has very fine fibers) which didn't seem to bother her at all, and were always readily available from Neiman-Marcus [$$$ Ouch!].

Another example of "soft" wool is "Lambs wool" which by definition is from the first shearing of a lamb and thus has softer fibers because they are still tapered at the tips. So, they "bend" on contact with skin while later shearings of the same animal (having already been cut) will have blunt ends which will tend to "poke".

... FYI: ...The oldest known woven wool fabric dates from 5,000 BC, and was found in a bog in Denmark.