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Every 20 minutes or so, an older diesel-powered railway carriage arrives at a graffiti-covered station. Close by, a police siren cuts through the near-constant road noise. Commuters rush by falling apart, ivy-draped fencing panels as storm clouds form.

It is maybe the last place you expect to find a perfectly formed vineyard. However one local grower has cultivated 40 mature vines sagging with plump mauve berries on a sprawling allotment sandwiched between a line of 1930s houses and a commuter railway just north of the city town centre.

"I've noticed people concealing heroin or whatever in the shrubbery," says Bayliss-Smith. "But you just get on with it ... and continue caring for your vines."

Bayliss-Smith, forty-six, a filmmaker who also has a kombucha drinks business, is not the only local vintner. He's pulled together a informal group of cultivators who produce wine from four discreet city grape gardens tucked away in private yards and community plots throughout Bristol. The project is too clandestine to possess an formal title so far, but the collective's WhatsApp group is called Grape Expectations.

Urban Wine Gardens Across the Globe

To date, Bayliss-Smith's allotment is the only one listed in the City Vineyard Network's forthcoming world atlas, which features better-known city vineyards such as the 1,800 vines on the hillsides of Paris's renowned artistic district neighbourhood and more than 3,000 grapevines overlooking and within the Italian city. The Italian-based charitable organization is at the vanguard of a movement re-establishing city vineyards in traditional winemaking countries, but has discovered them all over the world, including cities in Japan, South Asia and Central Asia.

"Vineyards assist urban areas remain more eco-friendly and ecologically varied. These spaces preserve land from construction by creating long-term, yielding farming plots within urban environments," explains the association's president.

Like all wines, those produced in cities are a product of the soils the plants thrive in, the unpredictability of the weather and the individuals who tend the fruit. "A bottle of wine embodies the charm, local spirit, landscape and heritage of a city," adds the president.

Unknown Eastern European Grapes

Back in the city, Bayliss-Smith is in a urgent timeline to harvest the vines he grew from a plant left in his allotment by a Eastern European household. Should the rain arrives, then the birds may take advantage to feast once more. "Here we have the mystery Polish grape," he comments, as he cleans bruised and rotten grapes from the shimmering clusters. "We don't really know what variety they are, but they are certainly disease-resistant. In contrast to noble varieties – Burgundy grapes, white wine grapes and additional renowned European varieties – you need not treat them with chemicals ... this could be a special variety that was bred by the Soviets."

Group Efforts Across Bristol

The other members of the collective are additionally taking advantage of sunny interludes between bursts of fall precipitation. At a rooftop garden overlooking Bristol's glistening waterfront, where medieval merchant vessels once floated with barrels of vintage from France and the Iberian peninsula, Katy Grant is harvesting her rondo grapes from about 50 plants. "I adore the aroma of the grapevines. The scent is so evocative," she remarks, stopping with a basket of grapes slung over her arm. "It's the scent of Provence when you open the car windows on holiday."

Grant, fifty-two, who has devoted more than 20 years working for charitable groups in conflict zones, inadvertently took over the vineyard when she returned to the United Kingdom from Kenya with her household in recent years. She experienced an strong responsibility to look after the grapevines in the garden of their recently acquired property. "This vineyard has already endured three different owners," she explains. "I really like the concept of natural stewardship – of passing this on to future caretakers so they keep cultivating from this land."

Terraced Vineyards and Natural Production

A short walk away, the final two members of the group are hard at work on the steep inclines of the local river valley. Jo Scofield has cultivated more than one hundred fifty vines perched on ledges in her wild half-acre garden, which descends towards the silty River Avon. "Visitors frequently express amazement," she says, gesturing towards the tangled vineyard. "It's astonishing to them they can see grapevine lines in a city street."

Today, Scofield, 60, is harvesting clusters of deep violet Rondo grapes from rows of plants slung across the hillside with the help of her daughter, Luca. The conservationist, a wildlife and conservation film-maker who has contributed to Netflix's Great National Parks series and BBC Two's Gardeners' World, was inspired to plant grapes after seeing her neighbor's grapevines. She's discovered that hobbyists can make intriguing, pleasurable natural wine, which can sell for more than £7 a serving in the increasing quantity of establishments specialising in minimal-intervention wines. "It is incredibly satisfying that you can actually make quality, traditional vintage," she states. "It's very fashionable, but really it's resurrecting an traditional method of producing vintage."

"During foot-stomping the grapes, the various natural microorganisms come off the surfaces into the liquid," explains Scofield, ankle deep in a bucket of tiny stems, seeds and red liquid. "This represents how vintages were made traditionally, but commercial producers introduce sulphur [dioxide] to eliminate the natural cultures and then add a commercially produced culture."

Difficult Conditions and Creative Approaches

A few doors down sprightly retiree another cultivator, who inspired his neighbor to establish her vines, has assembled his companions to pick Chardonnay grapes from one hundred plants he has arranged precisely across two terraces. Reeve, a Lancashire-born PE teacher who taught at Bristol University developed a passion for viticulture on annual sporting trips to France. But it is a challenge to cultivate this particular variety in the humidity of the gorge, with cooling tides moving through from the nearby estuary. "I wanted to produce French-style vintages in this location, which is a bit bonkers," says the retiree with a smile. "This variety is slow-maturing and particularly vulnerable to mildew."

"I wanted to make Burgundian wines in this environment, which is rather ambitious"

The unpredictable Bristol climate is not the sole problem encountered by winegrowers. Reeve has been compelled to erect a fence on