We will be referring to some research papers later this year, and fearing they might be lost in the link-vault, post them here so they are easily searchable (which was the original purpose of the blog).
As with the English agricultural records*, the French extend far enough back that we can tease out patterns.
First link, the headliner:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15810545/
AbstractDog-days, cold periods, grape-harvests (France, 15-19th centuries). The climate history can be based on several kinds of data. In the present paper, French records of grape-harvest dates in Burgundy from 1370 to 1890 were used for evaluate the climates at these various period of time. These results reveal that temperatures as high as those reached in the 1990s have occurred several times in Burgundy since 1370. Correlations between temperatures and historic data are presented.
And:
The climate in Burgundy and elsewhere, from the fourteenth to the twentieth century
This paper reviews the climatic history of northern France from the grape harvest dates of the Burgundian vineyards. The grape harvest date is constrained by the mean surface air temperature during the growing season (April–August). At the start of the grape harvest dates series – during the 1380s and from 1415 to 1435 – the tendency is towards early harvest dates and warmer conditions, starvation due to crop scorching in 1420 included.
During the second half of the ‘ Quattrocento’, there are later harvest dates and cooler springs/summers, exemplified by the 1481 famine, due to rain and cold. The 1500s, 20s, 30s and 50s are characterised by blasts of warmer summers. The ‘midsummer night’s dream’ (1596/7) can turn into a nightmare . . . Then, a cold ‘long seventeenth century’?
This is quite pronounced from 1570 to 1630, with, however, a slight improvement around 1600–20. Major waves of hot summers were experienced during the 1630s, 60s and 80s. Is the Maunder minimum, between 1645 and 1715, responsible for a slight, synchronous, cooling? In this case, it would be mainly the Late Maunder Minimum (1675–1715), with the chill of 1675, the 1690s and 1709–1715. Then the great warming of the eighteenth century: the years 1704–07, 1718/9, the 1720s and 30s, 1757–65, the 1780s and above all 1778–81 all favour this interpretation, though we must not forget the cold, wet years 1725, 1740 and 1770. The years 1812–17 are not only snowy but also globally cold (due to the Tambora eruption in 1815 and the Dalton minimum?). And then there is the 1846 heatwave, so harmful to cereals. The Little Ice Age ends in 1860, with no return up to the present, the twentieth century warming from 1900, with an intensification of the phenomenon from 1976 and particularly the 1990s
And
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00704-011-0410-3
Extreme grape harvest data of Austria, Switzerland and France from A.D. 1523 to 2007 compared to corresponding instrumental/reconstructed temperature data and various documentary sources
And:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.568.7478&rep=rep1&type=pdf
An open-access database of grape harvest dates for climate research: data description and quality assessment
And
The longest homogeneous series of grape harvest dates, Beaune 1354-2018, and its significance for the understanding of past and present climate
Abstract.Records of grape harvest dates (GHD) are the oldest and the longest continuous phenological data in Europe.However, many available series including the well-known (Dijon) Burgundy series are error prone, because scholars so far uncritically drew the data from nineteenth century publications instead of going back to the archives. The GHD from the famous vine region of Beaune (Burgundy) were entirely drawn from the archives, critically cross checked with narrative evidence. In order to reconstruct temperature, the series was calibrated against the long Paris temperature series comprising the 360 years from 1659 to 2018. The 664-year-long Beaune series from 1354 to 2018 is also significantly correlated with tree-ring and documentary proxy evidence as well as with the Central European temperature series (from 1500). The series is clearly subdivided into two parts. From 1354 to 1987 grapes were on average picked from 28 September on, whereby during the last 31 year long period of rapid warming from 1988 to 2018 harvests began 13 days earlier. Early harvest dates are shown to be accompanied by high pressure over western-central Europe and atmospheric blocking over Denmark. The extremely early harvests comprising the 5% percentile bracket of GHD are unevenly distributed over time. 21 of them occurred between 1393 and 1719, whereby this is the case for just five years between 1720 and 2002. Since the hot summer 2003, 8 out of 16 spring-summer periods were outstanding according to the statistic of the last 664 years, no less than 530 among them within the last 8 years. In the Paris temperature measurements since 1659, April-to-July temperature reached the highest value ever in 2018. In sum, the 664-year-long Beaune GHD series demonstrates that outstanding hot and dry years in the past were outliers, whereby they became the norm since the transition to rapid warming in 1988.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10584-010-9810-0
Grapevine harvest dates in Besançon (France) between 1525 and 1847: Social outcomes or climatic evidence?
*For more on other agricultural history, you may want to dip into the big daddy of price series:
by J. E. Thorold‐Rogers, 7 volumes, 1866-1887.
Here's another bit o'price series scholarship:
The paper constructs an annual price series for English net agricultural output in the years 1200-1914 using 26 component series: wheat, barley, oats, rye, peas, beans, potatoes, hops, straw, mustard seed, saffron, hay, beef, mutton, pork, bacon, tallow, eggs, milk, cheese, butter, wool, firewood, timber, cider, and honey. I also construct sub-series for arable, pasture and wood products. The main innovation is in using a consistent method to form series from existing published sources. But fresh archival data is also incorporated. The implications of the movements of these series for agrarian history are explored.
