Our plums are ripe early this year, and we need to use some up. I haven’t made my Pume Wine in a few years now, so I figured it would be good to make a new vintage. I am following the standard recipe I have used in the past, but I am cutting the sugar in half to make a bit of a lighter wine and to see how else that affects the final flavor. I am also skipping the step with the Campden tablets, as the ones I had were old and probably not effective anymore.
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Process:
Rinsed all of the plums. Cut them in half to remove the stems, and put them in a brewing bucket. Halfway through adding the plums, I added a about a gallon of water, just enough to cover the plums, and then used an immersion blender to break the plums up into a nice slurry. I continued adding the rest of the plums into the slurry. I then added another gallon of water and used the immersion blender again to break up the plums (though less effectively this time since the blender was only long enough to work on the top portion of the must). I topped the bucket up to just about the 6-gallon level with water, added the pectic enzyme, grape tannin, and sugar. I stirred the must to dissolve the sugar, and then pitched the yeast. I attached a blow-off tube for the initial fermentation.
8-28-16: Put into primary bucket with Campden Tablets, OG measured at 1.065 giving an alcohol potential of 8.6% ABV.
8-29-16: Not enough head space in the primary bucket. Had the lid pop off and small amount of overflow, so I transferred about two gallons of the wine and pulp from the 5-gallon bucket into a 3-gallon bucket and put an airlock on that.
9-11-16: Racked and filtered the wine, ended up with just under five gallons of liquid after removing all the pulp. Put into a 5-gallon carboy and sealed with an airlock.
4-28-17: Racked the wine to another 5-gallon carboy.
4-7-18: Bottled in 39 12-ounce bottles, still a little cloudy but tasted fine.
Tags: italian plum, plum, recipe, wine