there has to be an easier way

I made a plum wine with very ripe victoria plums last year. I simply crushed them in my hands and the stones came right out as I squeezed each one. The stones were quite sharp so I ended up with a few little cuts. Some latex gloves would probably have afforded me enough protection though... I made 30 bottles and had very tired hands, so I guess you'd be well off doing them in several batches if you were to use this method.

Jim

Hard to answer three top posts Tater, but here are some thoguhts;

• I made plum wine (sweet) this year. I modified a Jack Keller recipe (and strongly recommend checking his recipes over). * The math sounds about right. The plums actually produce very little juice - you need significant water for each gallon of wine, and will be adding significant sugar, acid, tannin, etc. Ata glance, without referring back to my own notes, I think I used a little less than 20 pounds of fruit and ended up, after racking and straining, with 2 1/2 gallons of wine - although had been planning on 3 gallons. There is a lot of fruit pulp that racks / strains off and takes considerable juice / wine with it* We judged plums simply by feel, just as you would for eating

• I do not recommend boiling - you're likely to create all kinds of strange flavors * We simply cut the stones out. Using pectic enzyme, the flesh breaks down and will have to be strained out later in fermentation. We cut and prepared about 60 pounds of fruit. Took a few hours, but wasn't a big hassle - just needed a bottle of wine to accompany the task!

Observation on the aging wine; it has an absolutely WONDERFUL nose. Exquisite. But the taste is yet harsh. Keller points out in his site that some of these plum wines take time to mellow with age. So I'm 'bulk aging' in one gallon jars indefinitely.

I processed this year 200 kilo plums.

I washed them first in a bath with household soda and then with sulphite.

Then I put them in a bucket and mash them with a potato masher. Works great and I had no pits crushed !!! Please take care examining the pits as if they are crushed they may introduce cyanide in the wine (almond smlee and taste), But with my plums the pits were so hard and almost impossible to crush.

Juice is released almost immediately. But that depends on the sort you are using. Add lots of pecto enzyme.

For details look at my web-log entry:

Succes Luc

Do you have to remove the pits? I'd guess they are pretty much inert anyway. I know that when using cherries (in beer) they generally leave the pits in to give it a more complex flavor (an almond flavor). I don't buy the whole cyanide thing - I believe you'd have to consume a ton (literally?) of pits to be a problem.

Regardless, I'll find out soon enough - I received a bunch of very ripe pluots (8lbs) and they are in primary at the moment - pits and all. If you don't hear from me in a year and a half, I was wrong about the cyanide.

I use the freezing method to breakdown the cell walls with fruit I add to beer every time. It works very well for that.

--Jeff

Hi, Plum wine is very good if you let it age and use one of Jack's recipes. I usually pit mine and then freeze the fruit. Darlene

That must have been monday(checks date), yep. now I have enough for a full batch once i figure out how to pit them. one of the 7 plum trees. looks to be about 25% harvested, with the rest not yet ripe.

Next year I am cutting the trees in half. no point in having plums if they are 15 feet off the ground. hope fully with half a tree and a whole root system that means they'll make bigger plums

This is still an issue. will thaw a batch i froze to see how well that worked. someone mentioned using an applesauce maker, although that takes the skins also, but i could pick the skins from the pits without issue. comments?

last year plums were ripe for about 2.5 weeks, at about 2 gallons a day that i am harvesting, this means i *should* have 35 gallons of plums. I really hope not. I really really hope not.

storage space is becomming an issue.

A follow up to my own reply - I left my pluots (pits, skins and all) in the bucket for longer than anticipated, and was figuring that it would cause a problem. Well, after two weeks, I racked it off the fruit and into primary and a taste revealed that there were no problems at all (that I could detect). Quite a bit of pulp seems to have transferred with the must, but I'm quite pleased with my first go with making fruit wine (or any wine, for that matter).

It could be that the pluot skins are less of a problem than plums. The wine is sweeter than I like at this point and will probably never get dry enough for me, but my wife likes it and it is probably around 15% alcohol at the moment (SG was 1.004 and I guestimate the original gravity was around 1.148: 4lbs sugar, 8lbs fruit, and I now have 1.5 gallons of must - I believe I added a wee bit over a gallon of water to the fruit initially).

I think I'll do a starter of a wine yeast that is known to go pretty dry (any suggestions?) and add it into the existing must to see how far it'll dry out. I'm not concerned about it going too dry at this point because of all the initial sugars. I'm surprised it went as far as it did because (don't cringe here) 1) I used ale yeast, not wine yeast and 2) I didn't have any yeast nutrient, so I used yeast energizer.

--Jeff