Plum Wine: Round Two

The end of the summer fruit season is closing in and I have been working hard to preserve what I can in what little time I have available for my endeavors.  This weeks farmer's market score was a beautiful box of little Italian plums that I got for $20 and a bottle of Cherry wine.  The Cherry wine was just freshly bottled so I had another large carboy available to make more wine and so that is what I did with my fresh box of plums.

The 24 pound box of plums would be just enough to make four gallons of plum wine, but first I had to wash, pit, and chop up all the plums.  I think the whole process took me five or six hours, but it will be well worth the effort.

The sweet golden flesh of these plums is a stark contrast to the deep red plums that I processed for the other batch of plum wine that I started a few weeks ago.  I am curious as to the color difference in the final product of these two wines.  I also believe that these plums are a bit sweeter, so I am hoping the finished product becomes a wonderful sweet dessert wine.

One by one the plums filled the primary fermenting bucket and when I was done chopping I topped it all off with boiling water and several pounds of sugar.  After it cooled down for several hours I added a few key ingredients to help break down the fruit and add body to the wine and then let it sit for twelve more hours before I added the yeast.  It will spend about a week in the primary before I filter out the juice and transfer it to the carboy where it will finish fermenting and become wine.  I think I have now started enough wine to last me a very long time.  All that is left to do is to find a place to store all of it!