Every quarter of an hour or so, an ageing diesel-powered railway carriage pulls into a spray-painted stop. Close by, a law enforcement alarm pierces the near-constant road noise. Daily travelers hurry past falling apart, ivy-covered fencing panels as rain clouds form.
This is maybe the last place you anticipate to find a well-established vineyard. However James Bayliss-Smith has cultivated 40 mature vines heavy with plump purplish grapes on a sprawling garden plot sandwiched between a line of historic homes and a commuter railway just north of Bristol downtown.
"I've seen individuals hiding heroin or whatever in those bushes," says the grower. "Yet you simply continue ... and continue caring for your grapevines."
The cameraman, 46, a filmmaker who runs a kombucha drinks business, is among several local vintner. He's pulled together a loose collective of growers who produce vintage from several discreet city grape gardens tucked away in back gardens and allotments across the city. It is too clandestine to have an official name yet, but the group's WhatsApp group is named Grape Expectations.
To date, the grower's plot is the sole location listed in the Urban Vineyards Association's upcoming global directory, which includes more famous city vineyards such as the eighteen hundred plants on the slopes of Paris's historic Montmartre neighbourhood and over 3,000 vines overlooking and inside Turin. The Italian-based non-profit association is at the forefront of a initiative reviving urban grape cultivation in traditional winemaking countries, but has discovered them all over the world, including urban centers in East Asia, Bangladesh and Uzbekistan.
"Vineyards help urban areas remain more eco-friendly and ecologically varied. They protect open space from development by creating permanent, productive farming plots inside cities," says the organization's leader.
Like all wines, those produced in urban areas are a result of the earth the plants grow in, the unpredictability of the climate and the people who tend the fruit. "A bottle of wine represents the beauty, community, environment and heritage of a urban center," notes the spokesperson.
Back in Bristol, Bayliss-Smith is in a urgent timeline to harvest the vines he cultivated from a cutting left in his allotment by a Polish family. Should the rain comes, then the pigeons may seize their chance to attack once more. "This is the enigmatic Polish variety," he says, as he removes damaged and mouldy grapes from the shimmering clusters. "The variety remains uncertain their exact classification, but they're definitely disease-resistant. In contrast to premium grapes – Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and additional renowned European varieties – you don't have to spray them with chemicals ... this could be a unique cultivar that was bred by the Soviets."
Additional participants of the group are additionally taking advantage of bright periods between bursts of fall precipitation. At a rooftop garden with views of Bristol's shimmering waterfront, where medieval merchant vessels once bobbed with barrels of vintage from France and Spain, one cultivator is collecting her dark berries from approximately 50 plants. "I adore the smell of the grapevines. It is so evocative," she says, stopping with a container of fruit slung over her arm. "It's the scent of Provence when you open the vehicle windows on holiday."
The humanitarian worker, 52, who has spent over 20 years working for charitable groups in war-torn regions, unexpectedly took over the grape garden when she returned to the United Kingdom from Kenya with her household in recent years. She experienced an overwhelming duty to look after the grapevines in the garden of their new home. "This vineyard has previously endured multiple proprietors," she says. "I deeply appreciate the idea of environmental care – of passing this on to someone else so they can continue producing from this land."
A short walk away, the final two members of the group are busily laboring on the precipitous slopes of Avon Gorge. Jo Scofield has cultivated more than one hundred fifty vines perched on terraces in her wild half-acre garden, which descends towards the silty local waterway. "People are always surprised," she notes, gesturing towards the tangled grape garden. "They can't believe they can see rows of vines in a city street."
Today, Scofield, sixty, is picking clusters of deep violet Rondo grapes from rows of vines arranged along the hillside with the help of her child, Luca. The conservationist, a wildlife and conservation film-maker who has worked on Netflix's Great National Parks series and BBC Two's Gardeners' World, was inspired to cultivate vines after seeing her neighbour's grapevines. She has learned that hobbyists can make intriguing, enjoyable natural wine, which can command prices of 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 truly make good, natural wine," she states. "It's very on trend, but really it's reviving an traditional method of making wine."
"When I tread the grapes, the various wild yeasts are released from the surfaces and enter the juice," says Scofield, ankle deep in a container of small branches, seeds and crimson juice. "This represents how vintages were made traditionally, but commercial producers add sulphur [dioxide] to kill the natural cultures and subsequently add a lab-grown yeast."
In the immediate vicinity sprightly retiree another cultivator, who motivated Scofield to establish her grapevines, has gathered his companions to pick white wine varieties from one hundred plants he has arranged precisely across two terraces. The former teacher, a northern English PE teacher who taught at the local university developed a passion for wine on annual sporting trips to Europe. But it is a difficult task to grow Chardonnay grapes in the humidity of the valley, with cooling tides sweeping in and out from the Bristol Channel. "I wanted to make Burgundian wines in this location, which is somewhat ambitious," admits Reeve with amusement. "This variety is slow-maturing and particularly vulnerable to fungal infections."
"I wanted to make Burgundian wines here, which is a bit bonkers"
The unpredictable Bristol climate is not the only problem faced by grape cultivators. Reeve has been compelled to erect a fence on
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