The vintner’s age-old habit of picking no grapes before their time may give scientists a tool for determining European climate patterns for the past 500 years.
Grapevines are particularly sensitive to the temperature and amounts of precipitation they’re exposed to at various phases of their 2-year fruit-production cycle. A pair of French researchers contend that an analysis of the yearly grape-harvest dates in Europe could help climatologists fill in the blanks of the continent’s postmedieval climate records.