Plum Wine: The Beginning

Summer fruit season is winding down and I was able to snag a couple boxes of plums from the local farmer's market at an excellent price of $40 for 40 pounds.  Not a bad deal for fresh, perfectly ripe plums.  I threw a couple of jars of my home grown pickles into the deal and it was sealed.  The next day the work began.  I was planning on making a full six gallon batch of wine from this venture, so I was going to need at least thirty-six pounds of plums to get started.

One round at a time the plums were weighed, scrubbed, pitted and chopped and then tossed into the primary fermentation bucket.  Once the chopping was finished, I topped off the fruit with a couple gallons of boiling water to bring the grand total to six gallons.  I mixed in half the sugar that the recipe called for, then let the mix cool down for several hours.

Once it was cool enough I added a few extra ingredients such as tannin, an acid blend, and nutrients for the yeast and allowed that to stand for 12 hours.  Last but not least I added the yeast and gave it a good stir.  The next morning when I checked the bucket it was pretty obvious that fermentation was under way.

The deep red mixture had taken on a pink froth as the yeast had actively begun to break down the sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide.  Over the next week, this mixture will get stirred up daily until the fermentation slows down a bit.  Once things calm down in the bucket I will strain out the remaining fruit pulp and then transfer my fermenting fruit juice into the glass carboy where it will finish the process of becoming wine.  It should take a few months before this wine will be ready for bottling.  I'm sure the taste will be worth the wait.