🔗 Share this article

Every quarter of an hour or so, an ageing diesel-powered railway carriage pulls into a graffiti-covered stop. Close by, a police siren cuts through the almost continuous traffic drone. Commuters hurry past falling apart, ivy-covered garden fences as storm clouds form.

This is perhaps the least likely spot you anticipate to find a perfectly formed grape-growing plot. However one local grower has managed to four dozen established plants sagging with round purplish berries on a rambling garden plot sandwiched between a row of 1930s houses and a local rail line just north of the city downtown.

"I've noticed individuals concealing heroin or whatever in those bushes," says the grower. "Yet you simply continue ... and keep tending to your vines."

The cameraman, forty-six, a documentary cameraman who also has a fermented beverage company, is not the only urban winemaker. He has organized a informal group of cultivators who make vintage from four hidden urban vineyards tucked away in private yards and allotments across the city. It is sufficiently underground to have an formal title yet, but the collective's messaging chat is named Vineyard Dreams.

Urban Wine Gardens Across the Globe

So far, Bayliss-Smith's allotment is the sole location listed in the Urban Vineyards Association's upcoming global directory, which includes better-known city vineyards such as the 1,800 vines on the slopes of the French capital's renowned Montmartre neighbourhood and more than 3,000 grapevines with views of and within Turin. Based in Italy charitable organization is at the vanguard of a movement re-establishing city vineyards in historic wine-producing countries, but has identified them throughout the world, including cities in Japan, Bangladesh and Uzbekistan.

"Vineyards help cities remain greener and ecologically varied. They preserve land from construction by creating permanent, productive agricultural units within cities," explains the organization's leader.

Like all wines, those created in urban areas are a result of the soils the vines thrive in, the vagaries of the climate and the people who tend the fruit. "A bottle of wine embodies the beauty, local spirit, environment and history of a city," notes the spokesperson.

Mystery Polish Grapes

Returning to the city, Bayliss-Smith is in a race against time to gather the vines he grew from a cutting left in his garden by a Polish family. Should the precipitation arrives, then the birds may take advantage to feast once more. "This is the enigmatic Polish variety," he comments, as he cleans bruised and rotten berries from the shimmering bunches. "We don't really know their exact classification, but they are certainly hardy. In contrast to premium grapes – Burgundy grapes, white wine grapes and other famous French grapes – you need not treat them with pesticides ... this is possibly a unique cultivar that was bred by the Eastern Bloc."

Group Activities Across the City

Additional participants of the collective are also taking advantage of sunny interludes between showers of fall precipitation. At a rooftop garden with views of the city's shimmering harbour, where medieval merchant vessels once floated with barrels of wine from Europe and the Iberian peninsula, one cultivator is collecting her rondo grapes from approximately 50 vines. "I adore the aroma of the grapevines. The scent is so evocative," she remarks, pausing with a basket of fruit slung over her arm. "It's the scent of Provence when you open the vehicle windows on holiday."

The humanitarian worker, fifty-two, who has devoted more than 20 years working for charitable groups in conflict zones, unexpectedly inherited the vineyard when she moved back to the UK from Kenya with her family in recent years. She experienced an overwhelming duty to look after the grapevines in the garden of their new home. "This plot has previously endured multiple proprietors," she says. "I really like the concept of environmental care – of handing this down to future caretakers so they keep cultivating from the soil."

Terraced Vineyards and Traditional Winemaking

A short walk away, the final two members of the collective are hard at work on the precipitous slopes of Avon Gorge. Jo Scofield has established more than 150 vines perched on terraces in her wild half-acre garden, which descends towards the muddy River Avon. "Visitors frequently express amazement," she notes, indicating the interwoven vineyard. "They can't believe they are viewing rows of vines in a city street."

Currently, Scofield, sixty, is harvesting clusters of deep violet dark berries from lines of vines arranged along the hillside with the assistance of her child, her family member. Scofield, a documentary producer who has contributed to streaming service's nature programming and BBC Two's Gardeners' World, was inspired to plant grapes after seeing her neighbor's grapevines. She's discovered that amateurs can make interesting, enjoyable traditional vintage, which can command prices of more than £7 a serving in the increasing quantity of establishments specialising in minimal-intervention vintages. "It is incredibly satisfying that you can actually make good, natural wine," she says. "It is quite fashionable, but really it's resurrecting an traditional method of producing wine."

"When I tread the grapes, all the natural microorganisms come off the surfaces into the juice," explains Scofield, partially submerged in a container of tiny stems, pips and red liquid. "That's how vintages were historically produced, but commercial producers add sulphur [dioxide] to kill the wild yeast and subsequently add a commercially produced yeast."

Difficult Conditions and Creative Approaches

In the immediate vicinity active senior another cultivator, who motivated Scofield to plant her grapevines, has assembled his friends to pick white wine varieties from one hundred vines he has arranged precisely across multiple levels. Reeve, a Lancashire-born PE teacher who taught at the local university cultivated an interest in wine on annual sporting trips to France. However it is a challenge to grow Chardonnay grapes in the humidity of the gorge, with cooling tides moving through from the Bristol Channel. "I aimed to produce Burgundian wines in this location, which is a bit bonkers," admits the retiree with amusement. "Chardonnay is slow-maturing and particularly vulnerable to fungal infections."

"My goal was creating European-style vintages in this environment, which is a bit bonkers"

The temperamental local weather is not the sole problem faced by grape cultivators. The gardener has been compelled to install a fence on