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Each quarter of an hour or so, an ageing diesel train arrives at a spray-painted station. Nearby, a law enforcement alarm pierces the almost continuous traffic drone. Commuters rush by falling apart, ivy-draped fencing panels as rain clouds gather.

This is perhaps the last place you expect to find a perfectly formed vineyard. However James Bayliss-Smith has managed to four dozen established plants heavy with plump mauve berries on a sprawling garden plot sandwiched between a row of 1930s houses and a local rail line just north of the city downtown.

"I've seen people hiding heroin or whatever in those bushes," says Bayliss-Smith. "But you just get on with it ... and keep tending to your grapevines."

Bayliss-Smith, forty-six, a documentary cameraman who runs a kombucha drinks business, is among several local vintner. He has pulled together a loose collective of cultivators who produce wine from four discreet urban vineyards nestled in back gardens and community plots across Bristol. It is too clandestine to have an official name yet, but the collective's messaging chat is named Vineyard Dreams.

City Wine Gardens Around the World

So far, Bayliss-Smith's allotment is the only one registered in the City Vineyard Network's forthcoming global directory, which features more famous city vineyards such as the 1,800 plants on the hillsides of the French capital's historic artistic district neighbourhood and over three thousand grapevines with views of and inside Turin. Based in Italy non-profit association is at the vanguard of a initiative re-establishing city vineyards in historic wine-producing countries, but has discovered them all over the world, including cities in East Asia, Bangladesh and Central Asia.

"Grape gardens help cities stay greener and ecologically varied. These spaces protect open space from construction by creating long-term, yielding agricultural units inside cities," says the association's president.

Similar to other vintages, those created in cities are a result of the earth the plants thrive in, the vagaries of the climate and the people who tend the grapes. "Each vintage represents the charm, community, environment and history of a city," adds the president.

Unknown Polish Grapes

Back in the city, Bayliss-Smith is in a urgent timeline to harvest the vines he grew from a cutting left in his garden by a Polish family. If the precipitation comes, then the pigeons may take advantage to attack once more. "This is the mystery Polish grape," he says, as he removes bruised and mouldy berries from the shimmering bunches. "The variety remains uncertain what variety they are, but they are certainly hardy. In contrast to premium grapes – Burgundy grapes, Chardonnay and other famous French grapes – you don't have to treat them with chemicals ... this is possibly a special variety that was bred by the Soviets."

Collective Efforts Across Bristol

The other members of the group are also taking advantage of sunny interludes between showers of fall precipitation. On the terrace overlooking the city's glistening harbour, where medieval merchant vessels once bobbed with barrels of vintage from France and the Iberian peninsula, Katy Grant is harvesting her dark berries from about 50 plants. "I love the aroma of the grapevines. It is so evocative," she remarks, pausing with a basket of fruit resting on her shoulder. "It recalls the fragrance of southern France when you open the vehicle windows on vacation."

The humanitarian worker, fifty-two, who has devoted more than 20 years working for charitable groups in conflict zones, unexpectedly inherited the grape garden when she returned to the United Kingdom from Kenya with her family in recent years. She felt an strong responsibility to look after the grapevines in the yard of their recently acquired property. "This vineyard has already survived multiple proprietors," she explains. "I really like the concept of environmental care – of passing this on to future caretakers so they keep cultivating from this land."

Terraced Gardens and Traditional Winemaking

A short walk away, the final two members of the group are hard at work on the steep inclines of Avon Gorge. One filmmaker has cultivated more than 150 plants situated on ledges in her wild half-acre garden, which descends towards the silty River Avon. "People are always surprised," she says, indicating the interwoven vineyard. "It's astonishing to them they can see grapevine lines in a urban neighborhood."

Today, Scofield, sixty, is harvesting clusters of dusty purple Rondo grapes from lines of vines arranged along the cliff-side with the help of her daughter, Luca. Scofield, a documentary producer who has worked on Netflix's nature programming and BBC Two's Gardeners' World, was inspired to cultivate vines after observing her neighbour's vines. She's discovered that amateurs can produce intriguing, enjoyable natural wine, which can sell for upwards of £7 a glass in the growing number of wine bars focusing on low-processing wines. "It's just deeply rewarding that you can truly create quality, natural wine," she says. "It's very fashionable, but really it's reviving an old way of producing vintage."

"During foot-stomping the grapes, all the wild yeasts come off the surfaces and enter the juice," says Scofield, ankle deep in a bucket of tiny stems, seeds and red liquid. "This represents how wines were made traditionally, but industrial wineries introduce sulphur [dioxide] to kill the wild yeast and subsequently add a lab-grown yeast."

Difficult Environments and Creative Solutions

A few doors down active senior Bob Reeve, who motivated his neighbor to plant her grapevines, has assembled his friends to harvest white wine varieties from one hundred plants he has arranged precisely across multiple levels. Reeve, a Lancashire-born PE teacher who worked at the local university developed a passion for wine on annual sporting trips to Europe. But it is a challenge to grow Chardonnay grapes in the dampness of the gorge, with temperature fluctuations sweeping in and out from the Bristol Channel. "I wanted to produce Burgundian wines here, which is somewhat ambitious," says Reeve with a smile. "Chardonnay is late to ripen and particularly vulnerable to fungal infections."

"My goal was creating European-style vintages here, which is rather ambitious"

The unpredictable local weather is not the sole problem encountered by winegrowers. The gardener has had to erect a fence on