BeerBorg

So, last weekend my wife and I took our kids on a nice little trip to Western Michigan; the weather was great, and on the way home we stopped at Crane Farms in Fennville, MI. They had a great crop of Japanese Shiro plums, and at 80 cents a pound, I just had to pick some! Now, I've got 9 pounds of wonderfully juicy yellow plums with a few red plums thrown in for good measure. Gotta make a small batch of plum wine!

Here's the recipe I settled on:

9 lbs plums
3 lbs fine granulated sugar
Water to 1.5 gallons
1 campden tablet
1.5 tsp acid blend
1 tsp pectic enzyme
1 tsp yeast nutrient
1 tsp yeast energizer
0.25 tsp grape tannin
Yeast - Lalvin 71B-1122

1. Line primary with a paint strainer bag. Wash the fruit, cut in halves to remove the seeds, then chop fruit and put in primary.
2. Pour water over fruit. Add the sugar and stir well to dissolve the sugar and add a crushed campden tablet. Loosely cover and let sit for 24 hours.
3. Add acid blend, pectic enzyme, tannin, nutrient, and energizer, cover, and wait 12-24 hours before adding yeast.
4. Recover primary and allow to ferment 5-7 days, stirring twice daily. Strain, syphon into secondary, and fit airlock.
5. Rack after 30 days, top up, and refit airlock. Rack every 30-45 days until wine clears.
6. Wait two additional weeks, rack again, stabilize wine, and bottle.

Any comments or suggestions?

Cleaned and chopped 9 pounds of plums, made the must; added 1 crushed campden tab - now we wait! Tomorrow, I will add the rest of the ingredients (other than yeast).

I pitched yeast last Wednesday, and have been stirring twice daily (OG was 1.105). This morning, I decided to take a gravity reading since it looked like fermentation was slowing - 0.996!!! Damn! This went faster than I anticipated. I pulled the fruit bag out, squeezed what I could, and will let it settle for a few hours before I rack it to a 1 gallon jug for aging. The sample tasted like a dry white wine.

Do you leave the paint strainer in the bucket during the whole primary, or do you remove it after 24 hrs?

FrozenInTime wrote:Do you leave the paint strainer in the bucket during the whole primary, or do you remove it after 24 hrs?

I just removed it now, along with the fruit pulp.

Racked the wine off the lees - ended up with a 1 gallon jug and a 750ml wine bottle for topping off. Fitted them with airlocks, and now we wait.

When you stabilize and back sweeten are you using potassium sorbate and inverted sugar, or something else?

Tasted my plum wine today - it's tart (in a good way), but still has a sweetness to it, even though it fermented dry. Doesn't taste like plums, just a pleasant fruitiness that's hard to place. It's clear with just a tiny bit of haziness (I was told that's the wax from the skins, and won't go away). Not sure if I'm going to backsweeten or leave it dry... I will let it age a bit longer before I decide.