Fermenting with nature: Microbial agency, sensory ethnography, and the politics of natural wines

Fermentation is often understood anthropocentrically as something to be managed and controlled, yet in practice it involves uncertain and situated relations between humans, microbes, and ecologies of nutrient organisms such as plant and animals. This article examines the rise of natural wine and natural ferments to analyse how microbial life participates in shaping taste, value, and ecological relations. Drawing on multisensory ethnography in South Africa and New Zealand, I trace the work of wine microbes and how winemakers cultivate bodily forms of attunement to that work that negotiates microbial activity as both productive and unruly. By tracing microbial worldings ethnographically, the paper makes three contributions. First, by theorising vineyard yeasts as part of complex human–climate–grape–microbe assemblages—in which niche construction processes are ongoing and reciprocal—I argue for the value of fermentation as a methodological and conceptual site for environmental research, one where microbial unruliness is accessible. Second, I argue that microbial agency in fermentation is fundamentally mediated by social power, colonial histories, and wider biopolitical regimes. Situating microbial life within political-ecological analysis resists fermentation fetishism, the tendency in social science to romanticise microbial relationality while ignoring the inherently uneven and often exclusionary structures that shape interspecies encounters. Third, it contributes to understanding natural wine and troubles the terms of intervention and terroir. As well as contributing to wine studies, I use the case of wine to make a broader theoretical point about how nature is mobilized as a political category. By foregrounding microbial agency and the ambivalence of “naturalness”, I argue that natural fermentation does not mean no intervention or a return to an authentic, unmediated nature. Instead, natural wines and ferments represent a series of deliberate political and sensory choices, highlighting the messy, situated practices of both care and control.