Contemporary popular sentiment towards English (and Welsh) wine can be well judged by a comment in ‘Punch’ (a satirical magazine) that the wine would require 4 people to drink it – one victim, two to hold him down, and one other to pour the wine down his throat. Wine making never completely died out in England, there were always a few die-hard viticulturists willing to give it a go, but production clearly declined after the 13th Century, had a brief resurgence in the 17th and 18th Centuries, only to decline to historic lows in the 19th Century when only 8 vineyards are recorded. Indeed, there is one lone vineyard reported in Derbyshire (further north than any Domesday vineyard) in the 16th Century when all other reports were restricted to the South-east of England. However, it’s probably not sensible to rely too much on these single reports since they don’t necessarily come with evidence for successful or sustained wine production. Lamb reports two vineyards to the north (Lincoln and Leeds, Yorkshire) at some point between 10 AD, and Selley even reports a Scottish vineyard operating in the 12th Century. Since the Book covers all of England up to the river Tees (north of Yorkshire), there is therefore reason to think that there weren’t many vineyards north of that line. Of the Domesday vineyards, all appear to lie below a line from Ely (Cambridgeshire) to Gloucestershire. Lamb’s 1977 book has a few more from other various sources and anecdotally there are more still, and so clearly this is a minimum number. Wine Research, 1990 (subscription)) who records 46 vineyards across Southern England (42 unambiguous sites, 4 less direct), but other claims (unsourced) range up to 52. Sources differ a little on how many vineyards are included in the book: Selley quotes Unwin ( J. Being relatively ‘frenchified’, the Normans (who had originally come from Viking stock) were quite keen on wine drinking (rather than mead or ale) and so made special note of existing vineyards and where the many new vines were being planted. The earliest documentation that is better than anecdotal is from the Domesday Book (1087) – an early census that the new Norman king commissioned to assess his new English dominions, including the size of farms, population etc. However, for the sake of argument, let’s assume that climate is actually the dominant control – so what does the history of English vineyards show? how easy was it to get better, cheaper wine from the continent? The marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine and the English King in 1152 apparently allowed better access to the vineyards of Bordeaux, and however good medieval English wine was, it probably wasn’t a match for that! The wider trade environment is also a big factor i.e. Societal factors range from the devastating (the Black Death) to the trivial (working class preferences for beer over wine). For instance, much early winemaking in England was conducted in Benedictine monasteries for religious purposes – changing rites and the treatment of the monasteries by the crown (Henry VIII in particular) clearly impacted wine production there. These range from changing agricultural practices, changing grape varieties, changing social factors and the wider trade environment. Selley and the website of the English Wine Producers.Īre vineyards a good temperature proxy? While climate clearly does impact viticulture through the the amount of sunshine, rainfall amounts, the number of frost free days in the spring and fall, etc., there a number of confounding factors that make it less than ideal as a long term proxy. I’ll use two principle sources, the excellent (and cheap) “ Winelands of Britain” by geologist Richard C. I’ll examine each of these propositions in turn (but I’ll admit the logic of the last step escapes me). The basic idea is that i) vineyards are a good proxy for temperature, ii) there were vineyards in England in medieval times, iii) everyone knows you don’t get English wine these days, iv) therefore England was warmer back then, and v) therefore increasing greenhouse gases have no radiative effect. This claim comes up pretty frequently, and examples come from many of the usual suspects e.g. Since a commenter mentioned the medieval vineyards in England, I’ve been engaged on a quixotic quest to discover the truth about the oft-cited, but seldom thought through, claim that the existence of said vineyards a thousand years ago implies that a ‘ Medieval Warm Period‘ was obviously warmer than the current climate (and by implication that human-caused global warming is not occuring). Never let it be said that we at RealClimate don’t work for our readers.
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