Yes, You can Cultivate Wine Grapes in English Vineyards Now

A common trope from contrarian activists is that the roman warm period (RWP) and medieval warm period (MWP) were warmer than today. The proxy data we have conclusively show this to be false, but most of these contrarians reject the proxy evidence. Instead, you often hear claims that during these previous times, you could grow wine in England, but you can't now. Therefore the globe was warmer then than now. One version of this trope is:
The Romans wrote about growing wine grapes in Britain in the first century,” says Avery, “and then it got too cold during the Dark Ages. Ancient tax records show the Britons grew their own wine grapes in the 11th century, during the Medieval Warming, and then it got too cold during the Little Ice Age. It isn’t yet warm enough for wine grapes in today’s Britain. Wine grapes are among the most accurate and sensitive indicators of temperature and they are telling us about a cycle. They also indicate that today’s warming is not unprecedented.”

Gavin Schmidt has written a couple posts from 2006 rebutting this claim here and here. He goes into a lot of detail about the usefulness of grapes as a proxy for temperature. Since there are economic factors involved, it simply isn't a good proxy. That is, perhaps you could grow grapes at 55°N in a.d. 1500 and in a.d. 2000, but the cost of operating the vineyard in a.d. 2000 is more expensive than just buying wine from farther south. So it could be that there are no vineyards at 55°N for economic reasons not climate reasons, since transportation of wine is more economical now than in a.d. 1500. Their argument is really silly, but it persists even to today.

However, if we were to imagine that the existences of vineyards to cultivate grapes for wine were a good proxy for temperature, then if it's warmer now, we should have vineyards in England. And we do. In fact, there have been vineyards in England since the 1950s.

Vineyards in England:

And vineyards are also found farther north than England today. For example:

So if even if we accept the contrarian reasoning that the northernmost latitude that you can cultivate wine grapes is a good proxy for global temperature, it's warmer now than during the RWP and MWP. And it's also certainly false that you can't cultivate grapes for wine in England now. That's been wrong for almost 75 years.


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