Six and a half centuries of harvest in Beaune

How to read the chart

Each year has one mark: the day the grape harvest began in Beaune. The higher the mark, the earlier the picking. Grapes ripen faster in a warm spring and summer, and the opening of the harvest was written down in the town’s records almost every year. That makes the date one of the longest records of summer warmth in Europe, reaching back three centuries before the first thermometer readings.

What it shows

Single years swing widely, by six weeks or more. Yet for more than six centuries the average held at the end of September: from 1354 to 1987 the harvest began, on average, on 28 September. From 1988 to 2018 it began on 15 September, thirteen days earlier. The authors of the study behind the series date a period of rapid warming from 1988. Their conclusion is that hot, dry years were exceptions in the past and have become the norm since then.

Three years are marked:

• 1816 (28 October) was the “year without a summer”, after the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 cooled much of the northern hemisphere.
• 2003 (19 August) was the summer of the great European heatwave, and is the earliest start in the record.
• 2018 (25 August) closes the series. The study notes that April-to-July temperatures in Paris that year were the highest in a record going back to 1659.

What it does not show

This is one town’s record, not the whole of Burgundy. A harvest date is a human decision as well as a natural one: the opening day was fixed locally, and custom and changing ideas of ripeness play a part. The chart says nothing about quality; an early harvest is neither better nor worse in itself. The series ends in 2018, so it makes no claim about any later year.

For the wine, our own view is this. Earlier picking usually means grapes ripened in more heat. In Pinot Noir and Chardonnay that tends towards riper, fuller wines with more alcohol and less acidity. This is one reason recent Burgundy vintages taste different from those of the 1980s.

Read on

The panel below compares this year’s growing season in the Côte de Beaune with the 1991–2020 average.

Journal No. 3, Eighteen days, sets harvest dates against April-to-August temperature since 1950. It uses a different series, a regional composite for Burgundy (Daux et al. 2012) that ends in 2006, so its dates differ from Beaune’s by a few days.