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Every quarter of an hour or so, an ageing diesel train pulls into a spray-painted stop. Close by, a police siren pierces the near-constant traffic drone. Commuters rush by falling apart, ivy-covered fencing panels as storm clouds gather.

This is maybe the last place you expect to find a perfectly formed grape-growing plot. But James Bayliss-Smith has managed to four dozen established plants heavy with plump purplish berries on a rambling allotment situated between a row of 1930s houses and a commuter railway just north of the city town centre.

"I've seen people hiding heroin or other items in the shrubbery," states the grower. "But you just get on with it ... and continue caring for your grapevines."

Bayliss-Smith, 46, a documentary cameraman who runs a fermented beverage company, is not the only urban winemaker. He has pulled together a loose collective of cultivators who produce wine from four hidden urban vineyards tucked away in back gardens and allotments across Bristol. The project is too clandestine to have an formal title so far, but the collective's WhatsApp group is named Vineyard Dreams.

City Vineyards Across the Globe

To date, the grower's allotment is the sole location registered in the City Vineyard Network's forthcoming world atlas, which includes better-known urban wineries such as the 1,800 plants on the hillsides of the French capital's historic Montmartre area and more than three thousand vines with views of and inside the Italian city. The Italian-based non-profit association is at the forefront of a movement re-establishing urban grape cultivation in traditional winemaking nations, but has discovered them throughout the globe, including urban centers in Japan, Bangladesh and Central Asia.

"Grape gardens help cities stay more eco-friendly and more diverse. These spaces preserve open space from development by establishing long-term, yielding agricultural units within cities," explains the organization's leader.

Similar to other vintages, those produced in urban areas are a product of the earth the plants thrive in, the unpredictability of the climate and the people who care for the grapes. "Each vintage embodies the beauty, local spirit, environment and heritage of a city," adds the spokesperson.

Mystery Eastern European Grapes

Back in Bristol, Bayliss-Smith is in a race against time to harvest the vines he cultivated from a plant left in his allotment by a Eastern European household. If the precipitation comes, then the birds may seize their chance to attack once more. "Here we have the enigmatic Polish grape," he comments, as he cleans damaged and rotten grapes from the glistering clusters. "The variety remains uncertain their exact classification, but they're definitely disease-resistant. Unlike premium grapes – Burgundy grapes, white wine grapes and additional renowned French grapes – you don't have to spray them with pesticides ... this is possibly a special variety that was developed by the Soviets."

Collective Efforts Throughout Bristol

Additional participants of the collective are additionally taking advantage of sunny interludes between showers of fall precipitation. At a rooftop garden overlooking Bristol's glistening harbour, where historic trading ships once bobbed with barrels of vintage from France and the Iberian peninsula, one cultivator is harvesting her rondo grapes from approximately fifty vines. "I love the smell of the grapevines. The scent is so evocative," she says, pausing with a container of grapes slung over her shoulder. "It recalls the fragrance of Provence when you open the car windows on holiday."

The humanitarian worker, fifty-two, who has spent over 20 years working for humanitarian organizations in war-torn regions, inadvertently inherited the grape garden when she moved back to the UK from East Africa with her family in 2018. She experienced an strong responsibility to maintain the vines in the garden of their new home. "This plot has previously endured three different owners," she says. "I really like the idea of environmental care – of handing this down to future caretakers so they continue producing from the soil."

Sloping Vineyards and Natural Production

A short walk away, the remaining cultivators of the group are hard at work on the precipitous slopes of the local river valley. One filmmaker has cultivated more than 150 vines situated on ledges in her expansive property, which tumbles down towards the silty River Avon. "People are always surprised," she notes, gesturing towards the tangled vineyard. "It's astonishing to them they are viewing rows of vines in a city street."

Currently, the filmmaker, sixty, is picking bunches of dusty purple Rondo grapes from lines of vines slung across the cliff-side with the help of her daughter, her family member. The conservationist, a wildlife and conservation film-maker who has contributed to Netflix's nature programming and television network's Gardeners' World, was inspired to cultivate vines after observing her neighbor's vines. She has learned that amateurs can produce interesting, enjoyable natural wine, which can sell for more than seven pounds a glass in the increasing quantity of wine bars focusing on minimal-intervention wines. "It is incredibly satisfying that you can truly create quality, 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 wild yeasts are released from the surfaces and enter the juice," explains Scofield, ankle deep in a bucket of small branches, seeds and crimson juice. "That's how vintages were made traditionally, but industrial wineries add sulphur [dioxide] to kill the wild yeast and subsequently add a commercially produced culture."

Difficult Environments and Inventive Solutions

A few doors down sprightly retiree Bob Reeve, who motivated his neighbor to plant her vines, has assembled his friends to harvest Chardonnay grapes from one hundred vines he has laid out neatly across multiple levels. Reeve, a northern English physical education instructor who taught at the local university cultivated an interest in viticulture on annual sporting trips to France. But it is a difficult task to cultivate this particular variety in the dampness of the gorge, with cooling tides sweeping in and out from the Bristol Channel. "I wanted to produce Burgundian wines here, which is somewhat ambitious," admits Reeve with a smile. "Chardonnay is slow-maturing and very sensitive to mildew."

"My goal was creating Burgundian wines in this environment, which is rather ambitious"

The temperamental local weather is not the only problem encountered by winegrowers. Reeve has been compelled to install a fence on