My Publications

In this paper we explore the nature of probiotic cultivation. Cultivation of the relations that biodynamic (BD) wine farmers establish with the microbes they materially cultivate in their vineyards for plant protection, biodiversity, and taste. We outline a suite of probiotic approaches to plant health and winemaking through which BD farmers recast vineyard microbes as biopolitical collaborators rather than scourge. We argue that these farmers’ practices evidence a post-Pasteurian shift, in which they have begun to cultivate, care for, and thus protect vineyard microbes that they now see as not only desirable but necessary.

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.

Brettanomyces (Brett) is an awkward, a yeast subject to much debate in the wine world. Brett changes taste profiles, but not in any simple or stable way. In doing this, Brett is an active agent in the making of wine, the social construction of taste/quality and the social experience of wine drinking/expertise. This article draws on ongoing ethnographic and auto-ethnographic research to argue that Brett's entanglement in social relations with humans is geographically and socially varied. Brett has different relations in natural wines for example.

This paper gathers gatekeeper views and perceptions on nano-enabled viticulture in Aotearoa New Zealand. While the science of nanotechnology is indicated to offer improvements to conventional vineyard inputs and operations, its acceptability by potential users and consumers has an impact on the governance of nano-enabled agriculture. This governance takes place not just at the state level through regulation and policy, but also through corporate, and community sectors' use of branding and narratives about nanotechnology.

To be more-than-human is to be relational, to no longer see the human as a discrete individual and to recognise the multivalent agency and import of the non-human in bio-physical, socio-economic and cultural worlds. This Special Issue galvanises an interest by Aotearoa New Zealand geographers in non-human–human relations and delivers more-than-human research from the edges of the discipline.

Why do we increasingly pay attention to where our food comes from, but not what is being put into our glass? This question is the focus of A Good Drink, where Shanna Farrell explores the sustainability efforts of the North American spirits industry. The book explores a range of case studies of spirits production done differently to industrial regimes.

This Routledge handbook offers an exploration of wine and society relationships through several disciplinary perspectives. Wine is a deeply sociocultural product: wine’s production, qualification, and consumption are all socially mediated. Perfect for students and researchers, the book offers an introduction to key ideas and debates.

This project investigates the social construction of nanotechnology in the context of the New Zealand wine industry by gathering current perceptions on nanotechnology from diverse actors connected to the marketmaking of wine. Nanotechnology offers an improvement to conventional vineyard inputs, however, its acceptability cannot be taken for granted.