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Every 20 minutes or so, an ageing diesel train arrives at a spray-painted stop. Nearby, a police siren pierces the near-constant traffic drone. Commuters rush by collapsing, ivy-covered fencing panels as storm clouds form.

It is perhaps the last place you expect to find a perfectly formed grape-growing plot. However James Bayliss-Smith has cultivated 40 mature vines heavy with round purplish berries on a sprawling allotment sandwiched between a row of historic homes and a local rail line just north of Bristol downtown.

"I've noticed people hiding heroin or other items in those bushes," says the grower. "Yet you simply continue ... and continue caring for your grapevines."

The cameraman, forty-six, a documentary cameraman who runs a fermented beverage company, is not the only local vintner. He's organized a loose collective of cultivators who make wine from several discreet urban vineyards nestled in private yards and community plots across the city. It is too clandestine to possess an formal title so far, but the group's WhatsApp group is called Grape Expectations.

Urban Wine Gardens Across the World

So far, the grower's allotment is the sole location registered in the City Vineyard Network's forthcoming global directory, which features better-known urban wineries such as the 1,800 vines on the slopes of Paris's historic artistic district neighbourhood and over three thousand grapevines overlooking and within the Italian city. The Italian-based charitable organization is at the vanguard of a movement re-establishing urban grape cultivation in historic wine-producing countries, but has discovered them all over the globe, including urban centers in Japan, Bangladesh and Uzbekistan.

"Vineyards assist urban areas stay more eco-friendly and more diverse. These spaces preserve open space from development by creating permanent, productive farming plots within urban environments," explains the organization's leader.

Like all wines, those created in urban areas are a product of the soils the vines thrive in, the vagaries of the climate and the individuals who tend the grapes. "Each vintage embodies the beauty, local spirit, landscape and heritage of a urban center," notes the president.

Unknown Polish Grapes

Back in the city, the grower is in a race against time to harvest the vines he cultivated from a plant abandoned in his allotment by a Polish family. Should the precipitation comes, then the birds may seize their chance to attack again. "This is the enigmatic Polish grape," he comments, as he cleans damaged and rotten grapes from the shimmering clusters. "The variety remains uncertain what variety they are, but they're definitely hardy. In contrast to premium grapes – Pinot Noir, white wine grapes and other famous French grapes – you need not treat them with chemicals ... this could be a special variety that was bred by the Eastern Bloc."

Collective Efforts Throughout Bristol

Additional participants of the collective are also making the most of sunny interludes between showers of autumn rain. At a rooftop garden overlooking the city's shimmering waterfront, where historic trading ships once bobbed with casks of vintage from Europe and the Iberian peninsula, Katy Grant is collecting her rondo grapes from about 50 plants. "I adore the aroma of these vines. The scent is so evocative," she remarks, pausing with a basket of grapes slung over her shoulder. "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 war-torn regions, inadvertently inherited the vineyard when she returned to the United Kingdom from East Africa with her household in recent years. She experienced an overwhelming duty to maintain the vines in the garden of their recently acquired property. "This plot has already endured multiple proprietors," she says. "I deeply appreciate the idea of natural stewardship – of handing this down to future caretakers so they can keep cultivating from this land."

Terraced Gardens and Traditional Winemaking

Nearby, the final two members of the collective are busily laboring on the precipitous slopes of the local river valley. Jo Scofield has established over one hundred fifty plants perched on ledges in her expansive property, which tumbles down towards the silty local waterway. "People are always surprised," she notes, indicating the interwoven grape garden. "They can't believe they are viewing grapevine lines in a urban neighborhood."

Today, Scofield, sixty, is harvesting bunches of dusty purple Rondo grapes from rows of plants slung across the cliff-side with the assistance of her child, her family member. Scofield, a documentary producer who has worked on Netflix's Great National Parks series and BBC Two's Gardeners' World, was motivated to plant grapes after seeing her neighbour's grapevines. She's discovered that amateurs can produce intriguing, pleasurable natural wine, which can command prices of more than seven pounds a glass in the increasing quantity of establishments specialising in low-processing vintages. "It is incredibly satisfying that you can truly create quality, traditional vintage," she says. "It's very on trend, but really it's resurrecting an traditional method of producing wine."

"During foot-stomping the grapes, the various wild yeasts come off the skins into the liquid," explains the winemaker, ankle deep in a bucket of small branches, pips and crimson juice. "That's how vintages were historically produced, but commercial producers add sulphur [dioxide] to kill the natural cultures and then add a commercially produced culture."

Difficult Environments and Inventive Approaches

In the immediate vicinity sprightly retiree another cultivator, who inspired his neighbor to plant her grapevines, has gathered his friends to pick Chardonnay grapes from one hundred plants he has laid out neatly across two terraces. The former teacher, a northern English PE teacher who worked at the local university developed a passion for viticulture on annual sporting trips to Europe. But it is a difficult task to cultivate this particular variety in the dampness of the valley, with temperature fluctuations sweeping in and out from the nearby estuary. "I wanted to make French-style vintages here, which is somewhat ambitious," says the retiree with amusement. "This variety is late to ripen and particularly vulnerable to fungal infections."

"My goal was creating Burgundian wines here, which is rather ambitious"

The temperamental local weather is not the sole problem faced by winegrowers. The gardener has been compelled to install a fence on