A newly published series of dates of grape harvest covering the past 664 years is the latest line of evidence confirming how unusual the climate of the past 30 years has been.
The record shows wine grapes in Burgundy, eastern France, have been picked 13 days earlier on average since 1988 than they were in the previous six centuries, pointing to the region’s hotter and drier climate in recent years. The results are now published in the European Geosciences Union (EGU) journal Climate of the Past.
“We did not anticipate that the accelerated warming trend since the mid-1980s would stand out so clearly in the series,” says Christian Pfister, a professor at the Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Bern, Switzerland. He conducted the study with other scientists and historians in Switzerland, France and Germany.
Thomas Labbé, a researcher at the universities of Burgundy and Leipzig and lead-author of the study, meticulously reconstructed dates of grape harvest in Beaune – the wine capital of Burgundy – going back to 1354. He used a large number of unedited archival sources, including information on wage payments made to grape pickers, Beaune city council records and newspaper reports. The continuous record of grape harvest dates now published in Climate of the Past extends until 2018 and is the longest ever reconstructed.
Continue reading at European Geophysical Union
Image via European Geophysical Union
