Abstract
We present a unique contextualised series of grape harvest dates (GHD) from Besançon, Eastern France, from the early sixteenth to the mid nineteenth century. The GHD series was processed to remove as far as possible health-medical and socio-political influences. It is well correlated with temperature indices determined from other documentary sources. However, we find that the relation between the GHD-series and the occurrence of meteorological processions is not convincing. At the inter-annual scale the Besançon GHD-series is highly correlated with the corresponding GHD-series from Germany, Switzerland and Burgundy (France) and to instrumental temperature series from England and the Netherlands. On the other hand, the series are not correlated to one another at the multidecadal scales. The origins of this decoupling remain to be elucidated.