Homemade Plum Wine

It's been many years since I made any wine, my wine has always been 100% natural without using concentrate.

In the past I have made dandelion, tea, rhubarb, parsnip, and Hubby made grape wine a couple of years ago.

This year my brother-in-law had an abundance of plums so Hubby popped by to pick a few. He made some lovely plum jam but we still hs loads of plums left...

... so I started off some wine.

I have my maternal grandfather's wine book, it's falling apart but I love it especially as it has his writing in. He made lots of wine but never left it to clear fully, the book says wine is ready to drink in a few months but to be fully clear it can take much longer.

All the equipment needed a good clean and sterilising. I cut the plums but still left the stones in. Step by step the wine was started and then left in the sealed bucket in garage for two weeks.

The next stage was very sticky and a bit messy. I strained the liquid into my sterilised demijohns through coffee filters which took a long time. I think I must have thrown my muslin cloth out, although it would have clogged up very quickly as the plums had disintegrated into mush. 

The recipe said to add 4 pounds of sugar but I only added one and a half as it wasn't dissolving and the demijohn was full.

I don't usually add yeast as the wine bubbles straight away from natural yeast in the fruit but nothing happened so I added half the amount in the recipe to each demijohn ... with bubbling effect.

It was a good job I had left the demijohns on the kitchen windowsill as it flooded over.

I syphoned a third from each into a third demijohn and put them on a spill catching tray in the conservatory where they bubbled away vigorously but without bubbling over.

After a couple of weeks the fermenting had slowed to a gentle pop and all the sugar had been dissolved. 

With huge thanks to my second cousin I now have four more demijohns, our son and girlfriend also found one for me, so I syphoned the plum wine into two cleaned demijohns and they are happily popping away.

My bucket has been cleaned and sterilised and is back in the garage...

... filled with 3 gallon of water and 7 pounds of apples from my second cousin's tree. Fully sealed in the bucket the apples are brewing for about two weeks before the filtering and bubbling process starts, I might see if this wine bubbles on its own before adding yeast.

I've quite enjoyed making wine again, the little bit of plum wine I tasted was very good so fingers crossed it will be lovely when finished.

We still have some apples left, and another bucket, so we're thinking of making scrumpy as I found a recipe in another brewing book. 

Thanks to my brother-in-law and my second cousin for the super plums and apples ... Chateau Hearnden is back!