🔗 Share this article

Every 20 minutes or so, an older diesel railway carriage arrives at a graffiti-covered station. Close by, a police siren pierces the almost continuous traffic drone. Daily travelers rush by falling apart, ivy-covered garden fences as rain clouds gather.

It is perhaps the least likely spot you anticipate to find a perfectly formed vineyard. However James Bayliss-Smith has managed to 40 mature vines sagging with round mauve berries on a rambling allotment sandwiched between a row of 1930s houses and a commuter railway just north of Bristol downtown.

"I've seen people concealing heroin or whatever in the shrubbery," states the grower. "But you simply continue ... and continue caring for your grapevines."

Bayliss-Smith, 46, a documentary cameraman who runs a fermented beverage company, is not the only local vintner. He has pulled together a loose collective of growers who produce vintage from four discreet urban vineyards nestled in back gardens and allotments across the city. The project is too clandestine to have an formal title yet, but the collective's WhatsApp group is named Vineyard Dreams.

Urban Wine Gardens Around the World

So far, the grower's plot is the sole location registered in the City Vineyard Network's upcoming world atlas, which includes more famous city vineyards such as the 1,800 plants on the hillsides of Paris's historic artistic district area and more than three thousand grapevines with views of and inside the Italian city. Based in Italy charitable organization is at the forefront of a movement re-establishing urban grape cultivation in historic wine-producing nations, but has identified them all over the world, including cities in Japan, Bangladesh and Central Asia.

"Grape gardens help cities remain greener and ecologically varied. They preserve open space from construction by establishing permanent, yielding farming plots inside urban environments," says the organization's leader.

Like all wines, those created in urban areas are a product of the soils the vines grow in, the vagaries of the weather and the people who tend the grapes. "A bottle of wine represents the charm, community, environment and history of a city," adds the spokesperson.

Unknown Eastern European Variety

Back in Bristol, Bayliss-Smith is in a urgent timeline to harvest the vines he grew from a cutting left in his garden by a Eastern European household. Should the precipitation comes, then the pigeons may take advantage to attack again. "This is the enigmatic Polish grape," he says, as he removes bruised and mouldy grapes from the shimmering clusters. "We don't really know their exact classification, but they are certainly disease-resistant. Unlike noble varieties – Burgundy grapes, Chardonnay and other famous French grapes – you don't have to treat them with pesticides ... this is possibly a unique cultivar that was bred by the Eastern Bloc."

Collective Activities Across Bristol

The other members of the collective are also making the most of sunny interludes between showers of autumn rain. At a rooftop garden overlooking the city's glistening harbour, where historic trading ships once floated with casks of wine from France and Spain, one cultivator is collecting her rondo grapes from about 50 vines. "I adore the aroma of the grapevines. The scent is so reminiscent," she says, pausing with a basket of fruit slung over her arm. "It recalls the fragrance of Provence when you roll down the vehicle windows on holiday."

Grant, fifty-two, who has devoted more than 20 years working for humanitarian organizations in conflict zones, inadvertently inherited the grape garden when she returned to the UK from East Africa with her family in recent years. She experienced an strong responsibility to look after the vines in the yard of their new home. "This vineyard has previously endured multiple proprietors," she says. "I deeply appreciate the idea of natural stewardship – of passing this on to someone else so they keep cultivating from the soil."

Sloping Vineyards and Natural Production

A short walk away, the final two members of the collective are hard at work on the steep inclines of Avon Gorge. One filmmaker has established more than one hundred fifty plants perched on ledges in her wild half-acre garden, which tumbles down towards the muddy local waterway. "Visitors frequently express amazement," she notes, indicating the tangled vineyard. "It's astonishing to them they can see rows of vines in a urban neighborhood."

Today, Scofield, sixty, is picking bunches of dusty purple dark berries from lines of vines arranged along the cliff-side with the help of her child, Luca. Scofield, a wildlife and conservation film-maker who has worked on streaming service's Great National Parks series and BBC Two's gardening shows, was inspired to plant grapes after observing her neighbor's vines. She's discovered that hobbyists can produce intriguing, enjoyable natural wine, which can command prices of more than £7 a serving in the increasing quantity of wine bars specialising in low-processing wines. "It is deeply rewarding that you can actually create quality, natural wine," she states. "It's very fashionable, but really it's resurrecting an old way of making vintage."

"During foot-stomping the fruit, all the wild yeasts come off the skins and enter the liquid," says Scofield, ankle deep in a container of small branches, pips and red liquid. "This represents how wines were made traditionally, but industrial wineries introduce preservatives to kill the natural cultures and then add a commercially produced culture."

Difficult Conditions and Creative Approaches

In the immediate vicinity sprightly retiree Bob Reeve, who inspired Scofield to establish her vines, has assembled his friends to harvest white wine varieties from the 100 plants he has laid out neatly across two terraces. Reeve, a Lancashire-born PE teacher who taught at Bristol University cultivated an interest in viticulture on annual sporting trips to Europe. However it is a challenge to cultivate this particular variety in the humidity of the valley, with temperature fluctuations moving through from the nearby estuary. "I wanted to produce Burgundian wines in this location, which is a bit bonkers," admits the retiree with a smile. "This variety is slow-maturing and very sensitive to fungal infections."

"I wanted to make Burgundian wines here, which is rather ambitious"

The temperamental Bristol climate is not the sole problem encountered by grape cultivators. Reeve has been compelled to install a fence on