🔗 Share this article

Every quarter of an hour or so, an older diesel railway carriage arrives at a graffiti-covered station. Nearby, a police siren cuts through the almost continuous road noise. Commuters rush by collapsing, ivy-covered garden fences as storm clouds form.

This is perhaps the last place you expect to find a well-established grape-growing plot. But James Bayliss-Smith has managed to four dozen established plants sagging with round purplish berries on a sprawling garden plot situated between a row of 1930s houses and a commuter railway just north of the city town centre.

"I've noticed people hiding heroin or whatever in those bushes," states the grower. "Yet you just get on with it ... and continue caring for your vines."

Bayliss-Smith, forty-six, a documentary cameraman who also has a fermented beverage company, is not the only urban winemaker. He's organized a informal group of growers who make vintage from four discreet urban vineyards tucked away in private yards and allotments across Bristol. It is too clandestine to possess an formal title so far, but the group's messaging chat is called Vineyard Dreams.

City Vineyards Across the World

To date, Bayliss-Smith's plot is the only one listed in the Urban Vineyards Association's forthcoming global directory, which includes better-known urban wineries such as the eighteen hundred vines on the slopes of the French capital's historic artistic district area and over 3,000 grapevines overlooking and within Turin. The Italian-based non-profit association is at the forefront of a movement reviving city vineyards in traditional winemaking countries, but has discovered them all over the globe, including urban centers in East Asia, South Asia and Central Asia.

"Vineyards help urban areas remain more eco-friendly and more diverse. These spaces preserve land from development by establishing long-term, yielding farming plots within cities," says the organization's leader.

Like all wines, those produced in urban areas are a result of the soils the vines grow in, the unpredictability of the climate and the people who tend the fruit. "Each vintage embodies the charm, community, landscape and history of a city," adds the president.

Mystery Polish Grapes

Returning to Bristol, Bayliss-Smith is in a urgent timeline to gather the grapevines he grew from a cutting left in his garden by a Eastern European household. If the precipitation comes, then the birds may seize their chance to feast 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 what variety they are, but they are certainly hardy. Unlike noble varieties – Burgundy grapes, Chardonnay and other famous European varieties – you don't have to spray them with pesticides ... this is possibly a special variety that was bred by the Soviets."

Group Efforts Across the City

Additional participants of the collective are also making the most of sunny interludes between showers of autumn rain. At a rooftop garden with views of Bristol's shimmering harbour, where medieval merchant vessels once floated with casks of vintage from France and the Iberian peninsula, Katy Grant is harvesting her dark berries from about fifty vines. "I adore the smell of these vines. The scent is so reminiscent," she says, pausing with a basket of fruit slung over her arm. "It's the scent of Provence when you roll down the vehicle windows on vacation."

Grant, 52, who has devoted more than two decades working for charitable groups in conflict zones, inadvertently took over the grape garden when she moved back to the United Kingdom from Kenya with her household in 2018. She experienced an strong responsibility to maintain the grapevines in the yard of their recently acquired property. "This vineyard has already survived three different owners," she says. "I really like the concept of environmental care – of passing this on to future caretakers so they can keep cultivating from the soil."

Sloping Vineyards and Traditional Production

Nearby, the final two members of the group are hard at work on the steep inclines of Avon Gorge. Jo Scofield has cultivated more than 150 plants perched on ledges in her wild half-acre garden, which tumbles down towards the silty local waterway. "People are always surprised," she says, indicating the interwoven vineyard. "They can't believe they can see rows of vines in a city street."

Currently, the filmmaker, sixty, is picking clusters of dusty purple Rondo grapes from lines of vines slung across the hillside with the assistance 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 motivated to plant grapes after observing her neighbour's vines. She's discovered that amateurs can make interesting, pleasurable traditional vintage, which can command prices of upwards of seven pounds a glass in the growing number of wine bars specialising in minimal-intervention wines. "It's just deeply rewarding that you can truly create quality, traditional vintage," she states. "It's very on trend, but really it's reviving an old way of making wine."

"When I tread the grapes, all the wild yeasts come off the surfaces and enter the liquid," says Scofield, partially submerged in a container of tiny stems, seeds and crimson juice. "That's how vintages were made traditionally, but industrial wineries add preservatives to eliminate the natural cultures and then add a lab-grown yeast."

Difficult Environments and Inventive Approaches

A few doors down active senior Bob Reeve, who inspired his neighbor to establish her vines, has assembled his companions to harvest white wine varieties from one hundred plants he has laid out neatly across two terraces. Reeve, a Lancashire-born PE teacher who worked at Bristol University developed a passion for wine on annual sporting trips to France. But it is a difficult task to grow Chardonnay grapes in the dampness of the gorge, with temperature fluctuations moving through from the nearby estuary. "I aimed to make French-style vintages in this location, which is a bit bonkers," says the retiree with amusement. "This variety is late to ripen and particularly vulnerable to mildew."

"My goal was creating European-style vintages here, which is a bit bonkers"

The temperamental local weather is not the sole challenge faced by grape cultivators. The gardener has had to erect a fence on