Making Plum Wine

I have a love of sweet plum wine.  I had my first taste at a wonderful little sushi restaurant and the rest is history.  After moving to the mountains, I had a hard time finding a place that sold any.  I didn't have a hard time finding plums however, so I decided to make my own.  I had made a couple of small batches in the previous couple of years and everyone that tried it, loved it, so I decided that this year I should make more than a gallon of this variety of wine.  The only problem was that I didn't have the proper vessels for the six gallons that I wanted to make.  Luckily I had a friend that had both the primary and secondary fermentation tanks that I needed, and they weren't using them at the moment, so they lent them to me.


Now that I had the equipment, I could get the plums I needed to make the wine.....all thirty six pounds of them.  The majority of the plums came from the local farmer's market.  I bought out one happy vendor of all of her plums which were a beautiful yellow fleshed plum with sweet and juicy insides freshly picked that morning.

 The rest of the plums came from a friend that had a red plum tree that had just started ripening fruit.  I sliced all of the plums in half and removed the pits.  Then I cut them into chunks and threw them in the first fermentation bucket.  I mixed them with half of the sugar called for in the recipe then topped off the bucket with boiling water.

 After cooling down overnight I added the wine yeast, stirred it well and then covered it.  For the next week I stirred up the bucket twice a day to help break down the fruit and release it's juices.  Once the week was over, I strained off the wine into the final fermentation vessel - the glass carboy.  Here the wine will finish fermenting over the next few months.  I will add more sugar to the wine the next couple times I rack it to allow it to reach the sweetness level that I want.  Once it has cleared I will be able to bottle it.  I am looking forward to sharing this wine with friends and family over the coming year!