Nikolai Siimes is a more-than-human geographer of agriculture, food, wine, and environmental knowledges whose work sits at the intersections of economic geography, political ecology, and science and technology studies. Originally training and working as a winemaker, since 2022 he has conducted ethnographic fieldwork with wine producers in New Zealand, South Africa, Canada, and Europe. His PhD project at Waipapa Taumata Rau (University of Auckland) is titled Thinking with Microbes: A Multiplied Ethnography of Wine Production for a Probiotic Agriculture after the Anthropocene. By centring awkward and ambivalent microbial relations, his work intervenes in the tendency of multispecies and more-than-human scholars to engage with charismatic and cuddly Earth Others (as evidenced by the growth of animal studies over say fungal studies). By spending time with those doing things differently, including biodynamic, natural wine, and regenerative producers, his research has explored new modes of knowing and relating to microbes across the production process. When he’s not listening to wine microbes, Nikolai also explores post-capitalist/community economies, sensory methods, intoxication, and novel agricultural technologies.
