🔗 Share this article

Every quarter of an hour or so, an older diesel-powered railway carriage arrives at a graffiti-covered stop. Close by, a law enforcement alarm cuts through the near-constant road noise. Commuters hurry past falling apart, ivy-draped garden fences as rain clouds gather.

It is perhaps the last place you expect to find a perfectly formed vineyard. However James Bayliss-Smith has cultivated 40 mature vines sagging with plump mauve grapes on a sprawling garden plot sandwiched between a line of historic homes and a local rail line just above Bristol downtown.

"I've seen people hiding illegal substances or whatever in the shrubbery," says Bayliss-Smith. "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 among several urban winemaker. He has organized a informal group of cultivators who make vintage from four hidden city grape gardens tucked away in private yards and community plots across Bristol. The project is too clandestine to possess an official name yet, but the collective's messaging chat is called Grape Expectations.

Urban Vineyards Around the Globe

To date, the grower's plot is the only one registered in the Urban Vineyards Association's forthcoming global directory, which features more famous urban wineries such as the eighteen hundred vines on the slopes of Paris's renowned artistic district neighbourhood and over 3,000 grapevines overlooking and inside Turin. Based in Italy charitable organization is at the vanguard of a initiative re-establishing urban grape cultivation in traditional winemaking countries, but has discovered them throughout the world, including cities in East Asia, South Asia and Uzbekistan.

"Vineyards help urban areas remain greener and ecologically varied. These spaces protect land from development by creating permanent, yielding farming plots inside urban environments," explains the organization's leader.

Like all wines, those produced in cities are a product of the soils the vines grow in, the unpredictability of the climate and the people who care for the grapes. "Each vintage embodies the beauty, community, environment and heritage of a city," notes the spokesperson.

Mystery Eastern European Grapes

Back in Bristol, the grower is in a race against time to gather the vines he grew from a cutting abandoned in his garden by a Eastern European household. Should the rain comes, then the birds may take advantage to attack once more. "This is the mystery Eastern European variety," he says, as he removes bruised and mouldy grapes from the shimmering bunches. "We don't really know their exact classification, but they're definitely disease-resistant. Unlike premium grapes – Pinot Noir, white wine grapes and other famous French grapes – you need not spray them with pesticides ... this is possibly a unique cultivar that was developed by the Eastern Bloc."

Collective Activities Across the City

The other members of the group are also making the most of sunny interludes between bursts of autumn rain. At a rooftop garden with views of the city's shimmering harbour, where medieval merchant vessels once floated with casks of wine from France and the Iberian peninsula, Katy Grant is collecting her rondo grapes from approximately fifty vines. "I love the smell of these vines. The scent is so reminiscent," she says, stopping with a container of grapes resting on her arm. "It's the scent of Provence when you open the car windows on vacation."

The humanitarian worker, fifty-two, who has devoted more than 20 years working for charitable groups in conflict zones, unexpectedly took over the vineyard when she moved back to the UK from Kenya with her household in 2018. She felt an overwhelming duty to maintain the grapevines in the yard of their new home. "This vineyard has previously endured three different owners," she explains. "I really like the concept of environmental care – of passing this on to future caretakers so they continue producing from the soil."

Sloping Vineyards and Traditional Winemaking

Nearby, the remaining cultivators of the group are busily laboring on the steep inclines of the local river valley. Jo Scofield has cultivated over 150 vines perched on terraces in her wild half-acre garden, which descends towards the silty River Avon. "People are always surprised," she notes, gesturing towards the tangled grape garden. "It's astonishing to them they are viewing rows of vines in a city street."

Today, the filmmaker, sixty, is picking bunches of dusty purple dark berries from lines of vines arranged along the hillside with the help of her daughter, Luca. The conservationist, a documentary producer who has worked on streaming service's nature programming and television network's Gardeners' World, was inspired to plant grapes after seeing her neighbour's grapevines. She has learned that amateurs can produce interesting, pleasurable natural wine, which can sell for upwards of seven pounds a serving in the growing number of establishments specialising in minimal-intervention wines. "It is incredibly satisfying that you can actually make quality, natural wine," she states. "It is quite fashionable, but in reality it's resurrecting an traditional method of making vintage."

"During foot-stomping the grapes, the various wild yeasts are released from the surfaces into the juice," explains the winemaker, partially submerged in a bucket of tiny stems, seeds and crimson juice. "This represents how vintages were made traditionally, but industrial wineries add preservatives to kill the wild yeast and subsequently incorporate a lab-grown yeast."

Difficult Environments and Inventive Approaches

A few doors down active senior another cultivator, who motivated his neighbor to plant her vines, has gathered his friends to pick white wine varieties from the 100 plants he has laid out neatly across two terraces. The former teacher, a Lancashire-born physical education instructor who worked at the local university cultivated an interest in viticulture on regular visits to Europe. However it is a difficult task to grow this particular variety in the dampness of the valley, with temperature fluctuations sweeping in and out from the Bristol Channel. "I wanted to produce Burgundian wines here, which is somewhat ambitious," admits the retiree with a smile. "This variety is slow-maturing and particularly vulnerable to fungal infections."

"I wanted to make European-style vintages here, which is a bit bonkers"

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