OhNoes! Mr. Bill!
The worst wine grape harvest since 1945…
https://www.iceagenow.info/france-worst-wine-grape-harvest-since-1945/
“Mainly attributable to the severe spring frost.” Wine harvest in Switzerland, Austria, Germany and Hungary also in trouble.
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“At harvests everywhere, in places where we thought there would be a little less, there’s a lot less,”said Jérôme Despey, head of a governmental wine advisory board.This year’s harvest will be the smallest since 1945, said Despey. He expects a 40% drop in output in the prime wine-growing region of Bordeaux, the country’s largest.This year’s drop in production is “mainly attributable to the severe spring frost that affected all the wine-growing regions to varying degrees at a sensitive time for the vine”, the agriculture ministry said.This comes after last year’s devastating harvest, one of the poorest in 30 years., which was “mostly due to the springtime frost” that hit the Champagne, Bourgogne (Burgundy) and Loire Valley regions, and the lack of rain further south near the Mediterranean.Devastating freezes two years in a row. Let’s hope this is not the beginning of a trend.Switzerland, Austria, Germany and Hungary also experienced frost this year, which could diminish harvests by 30% – even up to 60% in some areas.
Looks like Climate Change IS a disaster… just not in the way they said….
Musings from the Chiefio 
They may be attributing the wrong cause to this. I’m only around a couple of hours from Bordeaux, after all. I didn’t have any severe frosts this year, and there are enough grapes on the vines. The big problem is that there’s been bugger-all sun, so those grapes won’t ripen that much. May be able to eat some by the end of September (normally we start munching from the beginning of September or late August) but I don’t know. August, where in this part of France we’d expect wall-to-wall sunny days with a few summer storms, has been mostly cloudy and somewhat cool. They keep trying to predict that the next day will be sunny and will get above 35°C, but instead it stays cloudy and, on a good day, peeks its head over 30°C. June and July were also somewhat conspicuous for the lack of sunny days, I’d decided a month ago that, unless the sun resumed normal service, I wouldn’t be harvesting this year.
It’ll be a lousy year for wine, but conversely a good year for Armagnac where the low alcoholic content of the initial wine is an advantage. The end result has more flavour, having come from a larger quantity of wine.
If the models worked, they would have predicted this.
I just like the idea of this German hosted site called BREXIT-news doing the story about the poor French grape harvest.
http://www.brexit-news.de/french-wine-production-to-fall-18-this-year-after-spring-frost/
(OK so they got the story from Murdock’s Sky News Channel)
In Margaret River, south west of Western Australia spring was cool and summer late and fitful. Winter rains came in autumn and the crop suffered from rot. The upside was that flavours benefited from the cooler maturation conditions.
Off the coast, the Indian Ocean has been anomalously cool for two years and the bulk of the southern Ocean likewise. The Indian Ocean warmed faster than any other ocean over the last seventy years.
Most of the global ocean area lies in the southern hemisphere. Cloud cover over the ocean varies with geopotential height at 500hPa as does surface temperature. Geopotential height is a direct indicator of the temperature of the atmospheric column.
Followers of the AGW cult in Australia have been saying for several years that wine harvests have been occurring earlier and earlier, up to 3 weeks earlier here in the Adelaide Hills. In the last 2 years the harvest times have reverted to the original dates. No explanation except the winters in the last 2 years have been cool and wet.
Does anyone know if the stations selected for monthly mean T vary a great deal, and if so why and how is this determined?
( currently it is common for only 50 percent of the data to be used)
And here I always thought that one “year” was weather.
Bordeaux did suffer severe frosts……………….
http://www.decanter.com/wine-news/devastating-frost-hits-bordeaux-vineyards-367741/
the frosts were wide spread and also felt here were fruit has been lost because of it.
It happens nothing to do with perceived climate change just a cyclical factor that happens occasionally.