More-than-human temporalities are increasingly demanding our attention. My research into wine production explores the temporal rifts between humans, microbes, and vines and the practices used in temporal translation. In this paper, I draw on my ongoing fieldwork to think through not only how winemakers collaborate across more-than-human temporalities, but how my own research is pulled by two timescales; the urgency of modern technoscience and market demands (Marx, 2022; Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017) versus the slow observation needed to notice awkward and neglected ontologies.
Wine production, as with all agricultural production, is necessarily a result of human to more-than-human collaboration. As winemakers, my participants must reckon with the time and value creation of more-than-human actants, translating this to solar time and economic value (Brice, 2021). Labouring with microbes therefore involves negotiating these time differences. Winemakers not only keep pace with microbes, they must predict their next steps—intervening before anything goes ‘wrong’.
In this paper, I first discuss these time keeping practices and technologies of winemaking. Then, I use this case to think through my own temporal challenges in doing research on/with the more-than-human. I reflect on the theoretical, methodological, and practical challenges of reckoning with more-than-human temporalities within a PhD project.