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Each quarter of an hour or so, an ageing diesel-powered railway carriage arrives at a graffiti-covered station. Nearby, a police siren pierces the near-constant road noise. Daily travelers rush by collapsing, ivy-covered garden fences as rain clouds form.

This is perhaps the last place you anticipate to find a perfectly formed grape-growing plot. However one local grower has managed to four dozen established plants heavy with plump purplish berries on a rambling allotment situated between a line of 1930s houses and a commuter railway just above the city downtown.

"I've noticed people concealing heroin or whatever in the shrubbery," states the grower. "But you simply continue ... and keep tending to your grapevines."

Bayliss-Smith, 46, a filmmaker who also has a fermented beverage company, is not the only local vintner. He's pulled together a loose collective of growers who make vintage from four discreet urban vineyards nestled in back gardens and allotments across the city. It is too clandestine to have an formal title yet, but the group's WhatsApp group is named Vineyard Dreams.

City Vineyards Across the World

To date, Bayliss-Smith's allotment is the only one registered in the City Vineyard Network's upcoming world atlas, which includes better-known urban wineries such as the eighteen hundred plants on the hillsides of Paris's historic artistic district neighbourhood and more than three thousand vines overlooking and inside the Italian city. Based in Italy charitable organization is at the forefront of a movement re-establishing urban grape cultivation 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 greener and more diverse. These spaces protect land from construction by establishing long-term, productive farming plots inside cities," explains the organization's leader.

Like all wines, those created in urban areas are a product of the soils the vines grow in, the vagaries of the weather and the individuals who tend the fruit. "A bottle of wine embodies the charm, community, environment and heritage of a urban center," notes the president.

Unknown Eastern European Grapes

Returning to Bristol, Bayliss-Smith is in a race against time to gather the vines he grew from a plant abandoned in his garden by a Polish family. If the rain comes, then the birds may take advantage to feast once more. "Here we have the mystery Polish grape," he says, as he cleans bruised and rotten berries from the glistering clusters. "The variety remains uncertain their exact classification, but they are certainly disease-resistant. Unlike noble varieties – Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and other famous French grapes – you need not treat them with pesticides ... this could be a unique cultivar that was bred by the Eastern Bloc."

Collective Efforts Across Bristol

The other members of the collective are additionally taking advantage of sunny interludes between showers of autumn rain. At a rooftop garden overlooking the city's glistening harbour, where medieval merchant vessels once floated with casks of wine from France and Spain, Katy Grant is harvesting her dark berries from about fifty vines. "I adore the smell of the grapevines. The scent is so evocative," she remarks, pausing with a basket of grapes resting on her arm. "It recalls the fragrance of southern France when you open the vehicle windows on vacation."

The humanitarian worker, 52, who has spent over two decades working for charitable groups in war-torn regions, unexpectedly took over the grape garden when she returned to the United Kingdom from East Africa with her family in recent years. She experienced an strong responsibility to look after the vines in the garden of their new home. "This vineyard has already survived three different owners," she says. "I deeply appreciate the concept of environmental care – of passing this on to future caretakers so they can continue producing from the soil."

Sloping Gardens and Natural Production

A short walk away, the final two members of the group are hard at work on the precipitous slopes of the local river valley. One filmmaker has cultivated more than one hundred fifty vines perched on ledges in her expansive property, which tumbles down towards the muddy River Avon. "Visitors frequently express amazement," she notes, gesturing towards the interwoven grape garden. "It's astonishing to them they can see rows of vines in a city street."

Today, Scofield, sixty, is picking bunches of deep violet Rondo grapes from lines of plants arranged along the cliff-side with the help of her daughter, Luca. Scofield, a wildlife and conservation film-maker who has worked on Netflix's Great National Parks series and BBC Two's gardening shows, was inspired to plant grapes after observing her neighbor's vines. She's discovered that amateurs can produce interesting, pleasurable traditional vintage, which can command prices of more than £7 a serving in the growing number of wine bars focusing on low-processing wines. "It is incredibly satisfying that you can truly make quality, natural wine," she says. "It is quite fashionable, but really it's reviving an traditional method of making wine."

"During foot-stomping the grapes, all the wild yeasts are released from the surfaces and enter the juice," says Scofield, partially submerged in a bucket of tiny stems, pips and crimson juice. "This represents how wines were historically produced, but industrial wineries add preservatives to kill the natural cultures and subsequently incorporate a lab-grown yeast."

Challenging Environments and Creative Approaches

In the immediate vicinity active senior another cultivator, who motivated his neighbor to establish her vines, has assembled his friends to harvest white wine varieties from one hundred vines he has arranged precisely across two terraces. The former teacher, a Lancashire-born PE teacher who worked at Bristol University cultivated an interest in wine on annual sporting trips to Europe. However it is a difficult task to grow this particular variety in the humidity of the valley, with temperature fluctuations sweeping in and out from the Bristol Channel. "I wanted to produce Burgundian wines in this location, which is a bit bonkers," admits Reeve with amusement. "Chardonnay is slow-maturing and particularly vulnerable to mildew."

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

The unpredictable local weather is not the only problem encountered by grape cultivators. Reeve has been compelled to erect a fence on