cherry plum wine

ok so at my house, theres a cherry plum tree and those babies are soft and ripe. i want to make a 2l bottle of wine from these to get my feet wet making wines. i have made a mead before with apples so i know a bit about wine making, i just don't know about making wine from raw fruit only.

here's what i'm thinking, i harvest the plums, wash them really well, then vaccuum seal them and freeze them to burst the cells in the fruit, then heat them up to 160 and press the juice out of them and then take out the pits and ferment whats left in the pot, questions are, should i take the skins out? should i leave some in? do i need to cook just a little bit hotter to rid myself of the wild yeast?

if all of this sounds like its not right, please feel free to set me straight. i might be able to make this batch a bit bigger depending on how much fruit i get off the tree.

what i'm shotting for is a sweet plum wine, i know these cherry plums are a bit tart so thats why i'm trying to go sweet. i don't really like dry wines, most of the wines i drink are moscato, port, eis wine and chaucers traditional mead

thanks guys and gals

Freezing is a great idea- it really works to burst the cell walls.

Don't heat it up, though! Buy some campden tablets. What I do is get the fruit out of the freezer, and put it in a big mesh winemaking bag (sanitized, of course). Throw it into the primary bucket, and add the rest of the ingredients for the must. Dissolve one campden tablet per gallon in a little water (microwave works great!) and pour that into the must. Stir well, and cover with a towel. If using pectic enzyme (and you should), add it 12 hours later. Twelve hours after that, add your yeast and you're all set.

I don't know what cherry plums are! But for a typical recipe for fruit wine, do something like this:

3 lbs fruit
1 tsp pectic enzyme
2 lbs sugar (or to get the OG to 1.085-1.100)
7 pts water
1 tsp acid blend
1 crushed Campden tablet
1 tsp yeast nutrient
1 pkg wine yeast

Use only fresh unblemished fruit. Wash and destem and freeze. Combine water and sugar and put on to boil to dissolve sugar. Put the fruit in nylon straining bag, tie closed and crush in the primary. Pour hot sugar-water over berries to set the color and extract the flavorful juice. Add acid blend and yeast nutrient. Allow to cool to room temperature and stir in dissolved and crushed Campden tablet. Cover primary. After 12 hours, add pectic enzyme and recover. After additional 12 hours, add wine yeast, recover and stir daily for 3-5 days. Remove nylon bag and allow to drip drain (do not squeeze) about an hour. Return drippings to primary and continue fermentation until specific gravity falls below 1.015, stirring daily. Rack to secondary, top up with water and fit airlock. Use dark secondary or wrap to block light and preserve color. Ferment additional 2 months, then rack into clean secondary. Refit airlock and rack again after additional 2 months. Rack every 60 days as long as lees continue to fall, even if just a light dusting. When finished, you may stabilize if you wish to sweeten. Sweeten to taste and refit airlock. After 10-14 days, bottle in dark glass or store in dark place. Drink after one year.

Now, if your fruit has pits, be careful not to crush the pits when you smash up the fruit. If it's large fruit, you can remove the pits, but it seems like I always have little fruits (like chokecherries, or crabapples) with little pits so I'm just careful not to crush the pits. You throw away the pits and skins when you remove the pulpy fruit mess from the must, and any that have "escaped" can be loose in there because you'll rack off of anything in the bottom.

If you tell me what cherry plums are, I can give you better advice! Also, check out this site: winemaking: requested recipes (Maraschino-Chocolate Sweet Mead) He has tons of helpful information on wine yeast strains, recipes, techniques, clarifiing, aging, bottling, etc.

Cell walls are typically only needed for small fruit like blueberries or cherries, not really needed for fruit that you are going to cut up but it will help in the fact that it will get mushier. Get yourself some pectic enzyme to help break up the fruit and rid the wine of any pectin haze. I agree with the sulfites to kill off any wild yeast.

I would disagree that you need to heat the juice, people have been making wine from fruit for a long time without needing to sanitize it.
I am thinking of doing a very similar thing re pressing plums and fermenting the juice. As I see it there are 2 options, following Yoopers recipe which is the traditional and proven way, or doing what you suggest which is just pressing and fermenting the juice, the way they do with grapes. If you are going to just use juice you need to test the juice for OG and also preferably pH, if the OG is too low or the pH too high you would need to follow Yooper's recipe.

I was thinking of heating it to concentrate the juice and bring up my OG without using sugar. I don't really want to back sweeten it if I can avoid it. As for the acid blend, I have seen it used in meads and I make it without. What is the purpose of the acid blend?

The lower the pH, the safer a wine is for storage. Its not absolutely necessary but a wise precaution when trying a new recipe.

justbrewit said:

I was thinking of heating it to concentrate the juice and bring up my OG without using sugar. I don't really want to back sweeten it if I can avoid it. As for the acid blend, I have seen it used in meads and I make it without. What is the purpose of the acid blend?

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The acid blend is a blend of tartaric, citric, and citric acid. It helps to give some bite, flavor, and acidity to fruit wines.

If you're using just plums, depending on the SG of the juice, you may have to use many, many pounds of plums to get enough sugar to make wine without adding any sugar. The only fruit I know of that has enough natural sugar to make wine is wine grapes. Good lulck, and let us know how it turns out!

as i'm thinking more and more about this wine(haven't been able to think any thing else. so i picked the fruit, put it in vaccuum bags, put it in the freezer for about 2 hours until they were pretty firm. i then popped the little plums and made a nice mush lol

heres what i'm thinking about doing, it might not be tried and true method but i'm gonna give it a shot anyway. i got to thinking that maybe i'll add some honey to this wine. i guess make a melomal.

for a 3 gallon batch heres what i'm thinking;

10lbs of cherry plums hand pressed
5 lb can of wild honey
yeast food


i'll go tomorrow or when ever the LHBS is open and get some 14% alcohol tolerant wine yeast. i'll drain the juice mix in the bag through a strainer, put in the honey, bring to about 160 degrees. place the strainer over my fermenter, with the pits removed and pour my mead/wine mixture over it, sorta sparge the skins with the hot mixture.

once its all transfered into the fermenter, dump the skins in with the rest and ferment on fruit for 3-4 weeks, then transfer to the secondary for another 1-2 months. after that keg or bottle for another 1-3 months and try a sample. i'm hoping this will stay sweet.

when i did my cyzer i used 15 lbs of honey, fermented with water and yeast food for a week(about 7 gallons) and then got 10 lbs of apples, cored, peeled, put in water that was 160 degrees, pureed and put in the mead for 3 weeks.

this is what i'm basing this on is my first mead attempt and turned out amazing

does this idea seem like it will work? i know alot of this isn't the usual way to make wine but hey it worked for my mead right??

I just have a question about the fruit wine recipe. This recipe and many others tell you that when you remove the bag of fruit "Do not squeeze". I was wondering why they tell you this. There is certainly a tendency to want to get all the juice you can out of that bag and not waste it!
Hope this is not OFF TOPIC.
Thanks,

Gus

guscampag said:

I just have a question about the fruit wine recipe. This recipe and many others tell you that when you remove the bag of fruit "Do not squeeze". I was wondering why they tell you this. There is certainly a tendency to want to get all the juice you can out of that bag and not waste it!
Hope this is not OFF TOPIC.
Thanks,

Gus

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You don't want to extract more pectin. That's the same reason we don't boil the fruit- you don't want to create a permanent pectin haze.

I never fermented on fruit (even grapes) for more than 5-7 days, so I can't help much with fermenting on them for weeks. I would think the fruit would rot, but if the apples worked then the plums might.

I started a plum wine from juice pressed and given to me that had been previously frozen about a week ago. Just based on my experience, you probably won't be needing a lot of acid blend. Plums are pretty tart and have a lot of acid bite already. That being said, you may want more or your plums might be less acidic than mine (these are a wild Ozark variety).

Moving onto the juice. You will probably want to add AT LEAST 1 lb of sugar per gallon. I added 2 lbs per gallon and intend on adding another 1+ lb more per gallon today. The measured SG was around 1.060 with just the juice so you won't have very much alcohol with just the juice (it would be more like plum "cider"). Adding honey as you are talking about will help dry it out and add some alcohol but 5 lbs probably won't add enough fermentable sugar to get the wine up to much over 8 - 9% abv in 3 gallons.

Also, you will want to add pectic enzyme, even if you don't heat it. There will be a lot of residual pectin in the solution regardless of how you decide to get at the juice (plums make very good jelly partially for this reason). If you press the plums, just be prepared for a lot of "pulp" to be in the solution. It is OK as this will have a lot of flavor and sugar but it will take a while to clear and will create a good several inches of trub you'll have to avoid!

Finally, I used a Montrachet yeast. This yeast is tolerant well into the range you're looking for and isn't very likely to add a lot of funk to the mix, even if you ferment it out a little high. You can use almost any wine yeast, including Champagne, and get a nice wine. I did not add a Campden tablet (probably should have) and fermentation started within a few hours. I just poured the juice from container to container and dissolved the sugar by shaking (basically, like EdWort's apfelwein) and this seemed to oxygenate it nicely so the yeast really took hold quickly. Let me just say, it smells very nice!

Hope this helps!

i'm not planning on boiling my juice mix, just get it hot enough for pasturization. i believe i read some where that to pasturize youhave to get it up to 160. maybe i'm wrong, i'll have to research a bit further. mosly i'm looking for nice low heat to concentrate the juice a bit. don't know how long it will take to reduce this down at 160 but i'm game to try. if theres a homebrew shop around here open today i'm going to go pick up the yeast and honey and get the ball rolling on this.

Pasturization is more than just about temp, it also has to do with time and consistancy of what is being pasturized, at least that's what I learned several years ago in Food Science. Mostly what I've run across deals with pasturization of a liquid solution, like milk or juice. Since you're dealing with mashed plums, you'll have a thicker solution than either of those but, if you're planning on heating this to drive off water, you shouldn't have to worry much with that since pasturization will have occurred long before you finished... Let me continue.

Realize, however, that you'll be heating this solution for a very long time. When I brew, I expect about 1 gallon or so per hour to be driven off by boiling. Note I said "boiling." Since you are not going to boil, it will take much longer to drive off the water since, essentially, you are trying to create steam at low temperatures. But, be that as it may, you can most likely get the SG up to a higher level by heating but it may take quite a while. Were I going this route, I would probably just go ahead and heat it on up to drive off the water faster.

Also, keep in mind that you will be starting with quite a lot more than you will want to finish with. As in brewing, if you start with a "wort" of 1.060, driving off some amount will raise the SG by a proportional amount (in a perfect world where you don't lose anything other than water). So, let's assume you started with the juice at 1.060 (a pretty fair guess) before the addition of honey. To get it up to 1.080, you will have to reduce the amount of water by about 1/3rd. With the addition of the 5lbs of honey, you should be in the 1.095+ range if you have about 3 gallons left. If it ferments dry (1.000), you will have a weak (10% or so), but probably very good, wine. All this is basically being done in my head so your results may vary (do the calculations before continuing).

Also, I will again mention the pectin. Pretty much any heat will drive a lot of pectin into the solution. You'll be heating this a long, long time and probably extracting all the pectin there is in the fruit. Just remember to add pectic enzyme or this will never clear completely.

Summary, this will take time. I would go ahead and heat it higher if you're going this route. Get a proper SG to calculate how much reduction you will want to do and don't forget to add the honey to the calcs. And don't forget the pectic enzyme.

Hope that helps!

Oh, at least here, Whole Foods has a section where you can get maple syrup and wildflower honey "on tap" and is sold by the pound. The little cups they give you to put them in hold over 2lbs easily and the price isn't bad. FYI

Interesting read so far.. I just prepared a plum wine yesterday using 30lbs of plums from my backyard tree. Planning to pitch the yeast tonight when I get home from work.

I used pretty much the same recipe that Yooper posted. Seemed to be the "normal" way people do a fruit wine. I've lived at this house for almost 5 years and every year I think to myself that I should make a plum wine, but the darn things ripen so fast that by the time I notice they are ripe and start to research what I need to do - they are all on the ground! It was actually much easier than I thought it'd be, but it's alot of work to pit and crush all those plums - took me almost two hours. If I'd gotten to the tree a little sooner it would have been better cuz I could have been more selective and used the bigger plums, but I was stuck with alot of smaller plums with the occasional big one here and there.

I recently did a plum wine, I used one of these to juice the plums


I was able to make up about 2.5 Imperial gallons of juice and about a half gallon of must in with that from the juicer, I then made this up to 5 gallons with water and sugar, I can't remember the rest of the recipe but I have already posted it here on this forum.
It's bottled now, cleared perfectly and will make a nice wine in the end I think as it's still maturing.

Well, my bucket o' wine is happily fermenting away. I stirred it yesterday afternoon and now I know why they call it a "cap". It was like a semi-solid crust of fruit had settled on the top. Tasted the must and it's still very sweet and kinda tart. Color is really nice dark purple.

bruin_ale said:

Tasted the must and it's still very sweet and kinda tart. Color is really nice dark purple.

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What sort of plums are you using? Mine is definately tart and acidic. The color is more red than blue but it has a purple tint to it.

I believe it's a japanese plum. They have dark purple skin when fully ripe. Also, the ripe ones aren't all that tart - just sweet, which is why I like to eat them about a week before they are fully ripe. For wine though, I picked the most ripe ones as I was just crushing them by hand and removing the stones.

ok so, i'm about to make this tonight. i didn't get the bee keeper honey that i wanted, but clover honey went on sale at the store. i have the cherry plums all popped and waiting to be strained out and the stones removed. this whole thing is being tied up in cheese cloth and put in the primary.

the yeast i'm using is troubling me a little but i'm sure it will be fine. i'm using the red star pastuer champagne yeast. last time i made my mead i used lavlin 1118. that one goes to 18% i think this red star only goes to 15 or 16%, not a big deal, i'm sure things will be fine. so heres the recipe i'm doing tonight:

6 gallon batch:
10 lbs cherry plums(weight is before stone removal)
15 lbs clover honey
3 tsp of yeast nutrient
1 5g packet of red star champagne yeast
enough water to make 6 gallons after juice and honey addition

strain plums, remove stones, wrap skins in cheese cloth and place in fermenter. bring honey, juice and 3 gallons water to a boil for 15 mins. crash cool, splash into fermenter on top of fruit bag, pitch yeast, seal. ferment 1 month on fruit, after 1 month transfer to carboy and let sit for 2 months, bottle or keg

hows that sound? pretty simple and easy? i know i shouldn't boil the honey or the fruit juice but i am used to doing it with my beers and its worked out well for me, i'm not too worried about aroma at this point. just testing the mead waters until my feet are firm on the process.

what i'm shooting for is a mead that is sweet enough to balance out the tartness of these plums. these are some pretty tart plums so i need a good bit of sweetness.

thanks for taking the time to read. any and all feed back is welcome.


p.s. hhmmmm guess i should have posted this in the mead section. dang, my bad. if one of the mods feels like moving it cool, if not, well thats cool too lol

UPDATE
so i'm heating the mead or i guess its a melomel at this point, the stones were too hard to remove so all liquid was drained and everthing else thrown away. i ended up with one gallon and just a hair over of juice that was 1.094, i'm not sure how thick regular fruit juice is but man this stuff is thick.

i'll update SG once i'm done heating it, about to put my chiller in there to sanitize it

and heres what i ended up with:

starting gravity: 1.110
6 gallons total

the sample tasted very good, nice red color from the cherry plums. i'm pretty excited about this one.

how high is the gravity usually for wines?

justbrewit said:

and heres what i ended up with:

starting gravity: 1.110
6 gallons total

the sample tasted very good, nice red color from the cherry plums. i'm pretty excited about this one.

how high is the gravity usually for wines?

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Any updates on the final outcome? I'm trying to figure out a recipe for cherry plums and yours sounds like a winner to me.

This was from 10 years ago, and his last post was 8 years ago. But this does sound tasty.

Barc said:

What sort of plums are you using? Mine is definately tart and acidic. The color is more red than blue but it has a purple tint to it.

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I'd love to I know how the wine came out. We have a large cherry plumb tree bearing red-purple fruit. Every year it produces a ton of fruit!

I say go for it. The worst it should be is just ok.

Going to attempt a cherry plumb wine this week. Seems like a good place to start. Anyone have an outcome to share?