Siimes, N (2025) Making Time with Microbes. In P. Howland (ed.) Time and Alcohol: It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere! London: Routledge https://doi.org/10.4324/9781032632995
Abstract: In this essay I offer examples of how multispecies temporalities are dealt with practically in wine production. Taking up Catherine Phillips’ call to consider temporality in instances of nature–culture relations, I explore how winemakers – human and microbial – work together in practice. Microbes live largely unrelatable lives within temporalities of alterity, yet wine production can only occur through a multispecies negotiation between humans and yeasts. This essay offers a multispecies view of temporality by examining the practices of wine production to identify two timekeeping techniques that are deployed in wineries in order to work across temporal difference. I argue that human winemakers learn to be affected by yeasts through both ferment charting and listening to yeasts. Telling these stories of winemakers allows us to better understand the world of wine, and also to see new ways of relating in a multispecies world. The centring of dynamic, microbial temporalities also challenges the assumption that sidereal clock time is the only time in the world, and re/places wine at the confluence of multiple more-than-human temporalities.