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  • Damson/plum wine

    Hi everyone,
    Thanks for letting me join!
    i currently have a jar of rose petal wine fermenting out (supposed to take a week, been four so far!) - I'm becoming obsessed with timing the 'bloops'!
    My next project is Damson/Plum wine, I am planning to use harvested and frozen fruit - should I, bearing this in mind, use less water?
    thanks, in advance for your kind help..

  • #2
    Originally posted by Novicewinemaker12 View Post
    Hi everyone,
    Thanks for letting me join!
    i currently have a jar of rose petal wine fermenting out (supposed to take a week, been four so far!) - I'm becoming obsessed with timing the 'bloops'!
    My next project is Damson/Plum wine, I am planning to use harvested and frozen fruit - should I, bearing this in mind, use less water?
    thanks, in advance for your kind help..
    The bubbles only tell you that "something" is going on, not what or by how much etc.

    Hydrometer readings are the suggested proven way of knowing where your batch has got to.

    As for your Damson/Plum plan, plums can be a nuisance. They have a natural wax coating on the skin and many seem to have concluded that it goes some way to causing clearing issues. One suggestion I've previously read is to rinse the fruit in a bath of "soda ash" a.k.a. sodium carbonate (an accredited as safe food additive).

    I'd guess that you could do that then rinse it off with clean water.

    As for "less water" ? country wines are typically made with fruit and water, because the fruit doesn't yield as much juice as you get from grapes, so the idea is that you make it like a "fruit flavoured water". So how much fruit ? well depends on the depth of fruit flavour you want and how much (cost or effort) the fruit has cost you.

    Sure, the best mimick/equivalent to a grape wine would be to use all fruit that's been processed to release some juice so that the yeast can get to work, but that's often cost-prohibitive (unless you have the fruit trees/bushes/plants) to do "all juice". Obviously the more fruit used, the greater the depth of flavour (colour/aroma as well) levels.

    There's many places that will have recipes to use as a guide - sure you could use exactly as a recipe says, then at least you'd have made a benchmark batch for that recipe. I like to get the recipe and then add about 25% (by weight) extra fruit. It depends on how the ferment comes out, before I taste and decide whether the fruit level is ok, or whether it needs more of the original fruit flavour (country wines will always taste relative to the maker's flavour/aroma preference).

    It's up to you to consider what you want out of a particular fruit or recipe........
    Women will never be equal to men until they can walk down the street with a bald head and a beer gut, and still think they are sexy.

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