Plum wine/juice help

[harbisgirl]

I have 2.5 gallons of plum juice from our plum tree, that I froze earlier this year. All of the plum wine recipes I've found call for pounds of plums, not gallons (had this same problem with finding an elderberry recipe, guess I need to learn to use fresh fruit instead of already juiced). The plum juice is not overly sweet- they were the small burgundy tart little plums. Should I make wine straight from the juice or dilute it with water for a 5 gal batch? Is there a recipe that I can tweak for my situation or just wing it off of the brix? What is optimal brix for a plum wine? 24?

 

[buMbLeB]

The plum juice is not overly sweet- they were the small burgundy tart little plums. Should I make wine straight from the juice or dilute it with water for a 5 gal batch? Is there a recipe that I can tweak for my situation or just wing it off of the brix? What is optimal brix for a plum wine? 24?

Do you mean Damson Plums? Those are delicious, sounds like a great wine base. How much dilution is required to get you to 5 gallons? I've got some plum wine just bottled now that was from whole plums I boiled with added water, then strained the pulp off after a few days in primary - so far it's wonderful, but I didn't dilute it more than needed for boiling.

I don't use brix but looked it up, and at your level it looks like it'll come out just under 15%, which is strong (which is good!), but you could go a little lower also, say 22, and still be near 13%. At those levels, strong plum flavour is a good match.

Yooper has said something about plums being acidic - I don't know about that, but if it has bearing on your project perhaps she or others will chime in.

Good luck!

 

[harbisgirl]

I honestly don't know type of plum it is LOL It was planted by the previous owner. I have 2.5 gallons of juice, so to bring it up to 5 gallons I would have to add 2.5 gallons of water at a minimum (probably more like 6.5 to allow for sediment and racking). That sounds awfully watered down to me but the pics of other peoples wines are always very light and my juice is a deep, dark red. I'm sure that has to do with the type of plum but I thought I would check first.

 

[gratus fermentatio]

Approximately how many pounds of plums did it take to make that amount of juice? Figure that one out & you've got a pretty good ballpark figure to work with. I wonder if you could just weigh the frozen juice, double the weight & get a close figure of for the weight of the whole fruit? Just a couple ideas.
Regards, GF.

 

[buMbLeB]

I honestly don't know type of plum it is LOL It was planted by the previous owner. I have 2.5 gallons of juice, so to bring it up to 5 gallons I would have to add 2.5 gallons of water at a minimum (probably more like 6.5 to allow for sediment and racking). That sounds awfully watered down to me but the pics of other peoples wines are always very light and my juice is a deep, dark red. I'm sure that has to do with the type of plum but I thought I would check first.

Sorry for the delay, I was on the road. Like I said I'm no expert, but from the one batch I just made that sounds like too much dilution. The skins are going to impart a lot of colour, so I don't think you can go by that. I'd go by taste - you want to water it down (and then sugar it up) to the point where it will give 11-14% ABV (so maybe OG 1.090 or so), and it should taste like a strongly plummy, sweet plum jam juice.

That's all I got!