French plonk is being used to help track climate changes over the last 600 years.
Dates of wine harvests, carefully recorded each year in French parish churches and town halls have provided intriguing new clues about Europe’s climate history.
French researchers reconstructed temperatures in Burgundy from 1370 to 2003, using as the benchmark the Pinot Noir grape, which has been grown in the central France region since the Middle Ages.
The earlier the harvest began, the warmer the summer and it appears the scorching temperatures of the 1990s have had several parallels, notably in the 1520s and between the 1630s and 1680s. Other warm years were in the 1380s and 1420s, followed by a marked cooling by the 1450s.
The team say their estimates have been corroborated by local evidence from preserved tree-rings. Trees add a ring to their trunk for every year of their life. The bigger the gap between the rings, the better the growth, and the likelier the weather that year was favourable. A narrower gap points to worse climate conditions.
Grape-harvest dates offer the potential to trace geographical variations in temperature over large parts of Europe and the Middle East over past centuries. This will help put current thoughts on global warming into a longer term perspective
