Terroir and timespace: Body rhythms in winemaking

Abstract

In working together, practitioners search for ways to orchestrate their available resources in ways that structure or recognise forward momentum in a shared collective practice. Such resources often undervalue the significance of the practitioner body as performative resource(s) for practice and the rhythms of embodied activities that can signify the regularities and dissonances of practice. In this chapter, I examine an aspect of practice dynamics called body rhythms that builds upon Maussian ‘techniques of the body’ and Lefebvrian rhythm analysis. I discuss body rhythms in winemaking, a particular practice highly dependent upon the human senses of tasting, smelling, seeing, touching, hearing, talking and doing. The body is fully involved in sensory practices as well as in affective, aesthetic, cultural and political ways to generate a winemaking enterprise. To ‘live’ a productive practice in winemaking, various sociomaterialities must be ordered in particular spatiotemporal arrangements that communicate rhythmic integrity for practising others. Practice must synchronise to lifeworld rhythms of seasonality and climate that cannot be hurried or controlled, as well as to changing trends in wine consumption that influence wine production. The concept of terroir not only describes the geography, soil and climate of a certain place, but signifies the meaningful cohesion of winemaking work that is typically distributed across various disciplinary practitioners. In this relational sense, the rhythmic patterns that regulate, progress, emphasise or interrupt routinised ways of working remind us how interdependent, creative and emergent our practising actions become when we dance body rhythms together in timespace.