We love plums. They are the easiest stone fruit to grow (at least in England) and can be really luscious and heavy cropping. But they can be fickle. Some years, no crop due to poor weather at blossom time, other years massive crop much of which is wasted. One way to lose a lot of plums is to fail to pick them when they are really ripe and heavy rain is forecast. In this video I show the sad result of this. We're not beating ourselves up about it, and as I write (6 weeks after this video, been too busy to post recently) there are some 12 gallons of nice plum wine maturing in casks prior to bottling. how I make plum wine (rough recipe) 1 take as many plums as you can get, as ripe as can be. Burst or squashy plums are fine, but not rotten. Some damsons are good 2 place in suitable food grade polythene or stainless steel vessel. 3 pour boiling water over them until just covered 4 leave to cool to body temperature (around 40 C) 5 add pectolytic enzyme, read instructions for quantity. in UK this can be got from home brew store on line. It breaks down pectin and improves fruit flavour and sugar extraction and reduces haze. Cover. 6 after 24 hours add a wine yeast. cover-fruit flies must be excluded. 7 after about 6 or 7 days of fermentation, the plums should be pretty broken down, sugar fermented to alcohol and flavour extracted. 8 pour off the liquid through a seive into another vessel. add sugar to get the specific gravity up to about 90. 9 cover, allow to ferment for about 3-4 weeks. 10 siphon again into smaller vessels e.g. cglass demijohn with fermentation lock. Asdjust sugar if necessary. When fermentation has definitely stopped, siphon into bottles and seal. Can be drunk immediately or stored for several years. PS I added 2 cinnamon sticks and a few cloves and juniper berries to teh main fermentation, it imparted a nice spicy flavour. Do not overdo this. I also added some precipitated chalk to reduce the acidity as the wine was a bit too acid. Worked well. Don't be put off by alarm about 'additives' and 'chemicals' chalk is perfectly natural and harmless and made the wine nicer by neutralising excess fruit acid. CAUTION wine contains alcohol and if you drink too much or too often it can be harmful to health.

• published: 08 Oct 2014
• views: 420