🔗 Share this article

Each quarter of an hour or so, an older diesel-powered train arrives at a spray-painted stop. Close by, a law enforcement alarm pierces the almost continuous traffic drone. Commuters hurry past collapsing, ivy-draped fencing panels as rain clouds gather.

This is maybe the least likely spot you expect to find a well-established grape-growing plot. But James Bayliss-Smith has cultivated four dozen established plants sagging with plump purplish berries on a sprawling garden plot situated between a row of 1930s houses and a commuter railway just above the city town centre.

"I've noticed people concealing illegal substances or whatever in those bushes," says Bayliss-Smith. "Yet you just get on with it ... and keep tending to your vines."

The cameraman, forty-six, a filmmaker who runs a kombucha drinks business, is not the only local vintner. He's pulled together a informal group of cultivators who make wine from four discreet city grape gardens tucked away in private yards and community plots across the city. The project is too clandestine to have an official name yet, but the collective's messaging chat is named Grape Expectations.

City Vineyards Around the World

So far, Bayliss-Smith's allotment is the sole location listed in the City Vineyard Network's forthcoming global directory, which includes more famous urban wineries such as the eighteen hundred vines on the slopes of the French capital's renowned artistic district area and more than 3,000 vines overlooking and within the Italian city. The Italian-based charitable organization is at the vanguard of a initiative reviving city vineyards in historic wine-producing countries, but has discovered them throughout the world, including cities in Japan, South Asia and Uzbekistan.

"Vineyards assist cities stay more eco-friendly and more diverse. They protect open space from development by creating long-term, productive farming plots within urban environments," explains the association's president.

Similar to other vintages, those produced in urban areas are a result of the earth the vines grow in, the unpredictability of the climate and the individuals who tend the fruit. "Each vintage embodies the beauty, community, landscape and heritage of a city," notes the president.

Unknown Eastern European Variety

Returning to the city, Bayliss-Smith is in a race against time to harvest the grapevines he cultivated from a cutting abandoned in his garden by a Eastern European household. Should the rain arrives, then the birds may take advantage to attack again. "This is the mystery Eastern European grape," he says, as he removes bruised and rotten berries from the shimmering bunches. "We don't really know their exact classification, but they are certainly disease-resistant. Unlike noble varieties – Burgundy grapes, Chardonnay and other famous European varieties – you don't have to treat them with pesticides ... this is possibly a special variety that was developed by the Eastern Bloc."

Collective Activities Across the City

Additional participants of the group are additionally taking advantage of bright periods between bursts of fall precipitation. On the terrace with views of Bristol's shimmering waterfront, where historic trading ships once floated with casks of wine from France and Spain, Katy Grant is harvesting her dark berries from about fifty vines. "I adore the aroma of these vines. The scent is so evocative," she remarks, pausing with a basket of fruit slung over her shoulder. "It's the scent of southern France when you roll down the vehicle windows on vacation."

The humanitarian worker, 52, who has spent over 20 years working for charitable groups in war-torn regions, inadvertently inherited the grape garden when she returned to the UK from Kenya with her family in 2018. She felt an overwhelming duty to look after the grapevines in the yard of their new home. "This vineyard has already survived three different owners," she says. "I really like the concept of environmental care – of handing this down to someone else so they can continue producing from this land."

Sloping Gardens and Traditional Production

A short walk away, the remaining cultivators of the group are busily laboring on the precipitous slopes of the local river valley. One filmmaker has established more than one hundred fifty plants situated on terraces in her wild half-acre garden, which tumbles down towards the silty River Avon. "Visitors frequently express amazement," she notes, gesturing towards the tangled grape garden. "It's astonishing to them they are viewing grapevine lines in a city street."

Today, the filmmaker, sixty, is picking bunches of deep violet Rondo grapes from rows of vines arranged along the cliff-side with the help of her child, her family member. Scofield, a documentary producer who has worked on streaming service's Great National Parks series and television network's Gardeners' World, was inspired to plant grapes after seeing her neighbour's grapevines. She's discovered that hobbyists can produce interesting, enjoyable traditional vintage, which can sell for upwards of seven pounds a glass in the growing number of wine bars focusing on minimal-intervention vintages. "It's just deeply rewarding that you can actually create good, natural wine," she states. "It is quite fashionable, but really it's resurrecting an old way of producing vintage."

"When I tread the fruit, all the wild yeasts are released from the skins into the juice," explains Scofield, partially submerged in a bucket of small branches, pips and red liquid. "That's how wines were made traditionally, but commercial producers add preservatives to kill the natural cultures and then incorporate a lab-grown culture."

Challenging Conditions and Creative Solutions

In the immediate vicinity sprightly retiree another cultivator, who motivated Scofield to plant her grapevines, has assembled his friends to pick white wine varieties from the 100 vines he has arranged precisely across multiple levels. The former teacher, a Lancashire-born PE teacher who taught at the local university developed a passion for wine on annual sporting trips to France. However it is a difficult task to cultivate Chardonnay grapes in the humidity of the valley, with cooling tides moving through from the Bristol Channel. "I wanted to make French-style vintages here, which is somewhat ambitious," says Reeve with amusement. "This variety is slow-maturing and very sensitive to mildew."

"I wanted to make European-style vintages here, which is rather ambitious"

The unpredictable local weather is not the only challenge encountered by winegrowers. Reeve has had to erect a fence on